


The Shovel

by lyhoradka



Category: The Locked Tomb Trilogy | Gideon the Ninth Series - Tamsyn Muir
Genre: Blasphemy, Canon-Typical Violence, F/M, Gore, Grief/Mourning, HUGE HARROW THE NINTH SPOILERS, Religious Guilt, Sexual Content, Trauma, War Crimes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-05
Updated: 2020-08-14
Packaged: 2021-03-05 20:56:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 6
Words: 22,047
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25731718
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lyhoradka/pseuds/lyhoradka
Summary: And the world passeth away, and the concupiscence thereof: but he that doth the will of God, abideth for ever.Several years after the Empire stumbles over Blood of Eden, Mercymorn travels to a fringe planet.
Relationships: Mercymorn the First vs. Augustine the First, Mercymorn the First vs. Self, Mercymorn the First/Augustine the First, though really it should be
Comments: 69
Kudos: 90





	1. GENESIS

**Author's Note:**

> This story is fully written and revised, with some minor edits to be made to the later chapters. New chapters will be posted every other day.  
> A very special thanks to xxxdragonfucker69xxx (aka lizardkisser) for basically living in my brain from when I thought of this to when the polish dried on the last draft, for sticking it out through tons of “brief” phone calls that lasted well over two hours, and for gently bullying me because I have “no love for john in [my] heart.” I’m sorry that I didn’t make a Master of Bones joke anywhere in this - I’ll do better next time! x  
> Please refer to the end notes for content warnings relevant to this chapter.

_ O death, where is thy victory? O death, where is thy sting? Now the sting of death is sin: and the power of sin is the law. But thanks be to God, who hath given us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ _ . 

(1 Corinthians 15:55-57)

Almost ten thousand years, and Mercy would give anything to forget this: that silver room, like a greyscale photograph fading at the edges. The newly minted Saint of Patience standing there with his eyes a riot of color. The knowledge, sliding slyly between them, that he was First.

And on the heels of that thought: to be Second, she must have committed the very same sin.

He said, quietly, "Mercy." 

Almost ten thousand years, and still she wonders if he was begging for clemency, or just saying her name.

~ 💀~

4455 YEARS AFTER THE MURDER OF CRISTABEL OCT

By then they had been calling it a war for almost three thousand years, though they had been fighting it for longer.

They fought it in the Emperor’s name, under the Emperor’s banner, and with the Emperor in command. The Lyctors, those Holy Hands praying to the Prince of Death, his Fists and Gestures, were instruments of his will. And the Cohort, the army of his Houses, was the instrument of his vengeance.

Having accepted their purpose from the Lord’s hands, the Cohort then invented the beast of bureaucracy and kept it fed with a supply of official reports from which not even the Emperor’s Saints were exempt. 

Cyrus the First grudgingly submitted his paperwork.

The report was a transcript: large swaths of text as Cyrus rattled off codes and analysis of the security system of a planet that he’d noticed under circumstances that he was not inclined to share. Machaerus orbited a dim, unimpressive star, thousands of light years away from known settlements. Nonetheless, Cyrus claimed, it had a security system. It would, Cyrus warned, undergo updates within the next 72 hours. He had reason to suspect Blood of Eden activity, though those reasons, too, were left off the report.

After a mere four meetings, the Cohort Admiralty dispatched Communications Officer Eve Vakarian, newly promoted, to thank the most holy Saint and inform him that the Emperor’s order was to desist. 

Cyrus responded with a sadface emoticon, and dropped off all communication for the next several months as was his wont.

Mercymorn the First, the second saint to serve the King Undying, glanced up from the emoticon, downloaded the codes, and painstakingly composed a brief message of her own. 

Cytherea's reply arrived almost immediately. 

_ do not flake on the party, joy. ulysses has been toiling day n night. _

_ sorry! somewhere to be! thanks so much! _

_ i will tell him that you have crashed into a sun and died. and then i will drink all ur wine. _

_ xx _

~ 💀~

A small transport ship had been salvaged under circumstances that were kept off the official acquisitions report, but for once Mercy was not in the mood to rake the records department over hot coals for not doing their job. The quartermaster had opened their mouth to inquire, no doubt, where the Emperor's most venerated Saint of Joy would be taking this vehicle, and promptly wilted under Mercy's unblinking stare. They meekly held out the start codes instead.

"Will you be needing an escort?" they inquired politely. Mercy decided she had no time to take offense.

"No, just supplies for - let's say a month." The quartermaster inclined their head. Mercy added, "I expect the tracking devices removed as well."

There was the briefest of pauses.

The quartermaster glanced up, then at the shuttle, and finally at Mercy. "Of course, Holy Finger."

Mercy made a mental note to recommend a pay raise.

By the time the shuttle disengaged from the  _ Andromache _ , Mercy had sixty seven hours to arrive at Machaerus and use the codes to enter the planet. She considered dipping into the River, but it wasn’t worth the strain. It would be a forty two hour trip - she could use the time to clear her mind.

~ 💀~

Machaerus was a small, dark brown planet hugging as close to its star as it dared. It looked like its crust had been cracked - an egg dropped but not yet oozing. When Mercy flew close enough that the scanners beeped a wary warning, she realized that it must be rivers. They didn't look like they still held water.

Cyrus' access codes flared green and blue until a disinterested voice pinged over the speaker and requested a written account of identity and purpose for travel. Mercy sent it off without comment. 

A few minutes later: "You are here temporarily?"

"Correct," Mercy said. "A few weeks."

"No reason?" the voice asked again.

Mercy felt herself nodding uselessly. "No reason."

She didn't know enough about the settlement or the arm of Blood of Eden that operated here to risk any specificity. It looked suspicious, yes, and it might make her stay here more difficult. But if she fucked up and offered them a cover story that they could easily disprove, it would be over before it began. 

"Please land in Bay 667-Delta-9," said the voice, and clicked off.

Squinting against the light, Mercy bought the shuttle to an easy landing.

The shuttle doors opened to the sight of brick and dirt, and a girl who looked so young she might as well have graduated school yesterday. Maybe she had.

"Miss Dagher?" she said, and stepped forward with her palm out expectantly. "Clerk Jasmine Tate. Welcome to Machaerus Station."

Mercy shook her hand, and the map of Clerk Tate's body rolled itself out like a tablecloth: the meat of her hand and the rub of each knucklebone against the other, the steady pump of red and white blood cells right underneath the skin. She took stock of Mercy curiously, and Mercy let her, pasting on a slight, polite smile that she'd learned from dear, kind Anastasia. 

"Thank you so very much," she said, and caught Tate's gaze. "Is there anything I need to sign?"

"Oh, no. We've downloaded all information from your shuttle, it will be parked for you. You'll have to check in within two weeks of your stay and provide an updated time of expected departure."

"And if I decide to stay?" Mercy considered a wink, but decided not to push it. She watched Tate's eyes drop to her thighs for the second time, with great interest. "You like the trousers?"

Tate blinked, and immediately flushed a rich scarlet. "Oh, yes. That is -" She cleared her throat. "I haven't seen a design like that before. I apologize," she added stiffly.

Mercy waved her hand in the air, wrist loose, as though she heard it all the time. The trousers were a deep blue color, sewn through with reinforced steel - the perfect match to the billowy white blouse that tapered at the wrists into thick cords. If the Cohort kept few Edenite ships, they kept even fewer articles of clothing, but this ensemble had been plucked by the  _ Andromache  _ historians with great curiosity. Mercy guessed that it was a hundred and twenty years old, at least. That was around the time that some of the Emperor’s enemies started the fashion of carrying thin, flexible vials of lighter fluid in the folds at the shirt wrist in case they found themselves in the unfortunate situation of facing evil necromancers. They did so fear leaving their corpses for the enemy's use.

"It's vintage," Mercy said.

Tate cleared her throat again. "Right, er, we'll see you in two weeks."

Left alone at last, watching her borrowed shuttle carefully roll away to tuck into a parking space, Mercy made herself ask what the fuck she thought she was doing.

She was alone on an Edenite planet without a mission, having landed here against explicit orders not to engage. She was, for the first time since this war began in earnest, without a plan or course of action that expected the arrival of the Cohort to wreak havoc with the thanergy that was her job to produce. Her cover, such as it was, hung by a thread. She had a week at most, maybe less. There was no safe house in which to stay.

Mercy took a deep breath, and decided to get a drink.

Careful questioning revealed that the nearest actually populated area was two shuttle rides away, which was a wrench in her plans that Mercy accepted with grace. That meant those same two shuttle rides back, or at the very least a very long walk. Mercy hated long walks. 

She comforted herself with the thought that she was doing a fabulous job blending in with the Edenite rabble, considering that they all deserved to find themselves bleeding out on her sword the minute that she landed here.

She sucked it up and got on the shuttle. She was one of only three passengers, the only others a parent and child who chose a seat at the very front and spent most of the ride reading together. Mercy sat as much out of their sight as possible, and settled in to watch the sights.

Machaerus proper spread out before her, like a city built out of toy blocks. Red brick gave way to yellow clay and then to red brick again, the structures uniform in their shape but not their proportions. The walls were so thick that the window frames doubled as ledges; Mercy saw more than one person curled up there, enjoying the sun. The doors gave the appearance of carved yawning mouths, almost crude in their simplicity. In the heat they were left open, sheets of a thin, fabric-like material hanging from the doorway like a curtain. In spite of herself, Mercy took all of this in ravenously.

What at first had looked like brick was suddenly, obviously, rough cut stone. The structures rose up and then appeared to have been stopped by some invisible hand, their roofs the safe flat and even plane. Gardens fought for survival on some of them, others boasted of potted greenery. Laundry hung in neat rows on balconies of the same square mold as the rest of the architecture. 

Mercy disembarked at the first stop. As she stepped onto the hard packed ground, her stomach swooped. She started to walk in the direction that she gauged as the center of the city, if this city had a center. No one looked at her.

The thing was - Machaerus was beautiful. Not the way that the Eighth House was beautiful, with its clean precise lines and the gleaming white marble. Not the way that the Mithraeum was beautiful, the chapel and dormitories and the seat of God, the most holy place that the Emperor’s subject would never see unless they earned it in death. 

Machaerus was beautiful in the way that the First House was beautiful before it was the First House, before the Lord, in his mercy, returned it to life at the small cost of its soul. It lived as a ghost in Mercy’s memories, the shape and taste of it, like a wound forever bleeding. 

Of course, they weren’t the same. Just the color of the light, sometimes, when Mercy stopped to lean against a building and breathe. The sound of a rusty bell announcing its presence as a pair of gawky teenagers raced past on bicycles, bickering and swerving around the crowd. 

Simply, it was a place where people lived.

Luckily for Mercy, it was also a place where people drank.

She spotted a carved, beautiful sign proclaiming the establishment below it as simply The Star. She didn't know what the locals called it - a pub? A bar? It sat small and tucked into the corner of a street, the lighting dimmed even in the middle of the day. Mercy realized it must be almost always day here - the planet was almost fully tidelocked to its sun, wobbling with remnant momentum.

No one looked at her.

She sat down, ordered a drink as politely as she could manage - "Something strong, I don't care" -- and inhaled very slowly. Even the oxygen here tasted different, edging into her bloodstream with distaste. It took its sweet time getting to her heart. Mercy closed her eyes and forced herself to think. Just - it had been so long since she'd walked in anywhere and failed to draw every eye, her Lyctor robe like a beacon. She felt unexpectedly naked without it. 

"I'd lower my expectations if I were you," said someone to her right. Mercy forced her fingers to unclench where she'd dug them into the edge of the table. 

Slowly, talking herself through each move like a toddler, she looked over and delivered a smile that, God willing, didn't make her look like she was out of her mind with discomfort. "Expectations?"

"For the drink," said the man. "Their definition of strong is just more piss and less water."

He had a kind face, Mercy thought, if she were the sort of person who called faces kind. Dark skin and bright eyes and an easy smile, inviting her to share the joke. He held a mug of something that smelled just as strong as he'd promised. 

He wore the gray-gold uniform of a Blood of Eden officer.

Mercy tamped down on a slow, vicious thrill, and let her smile widen.

She offered her hand, palm up, just the way that Clerk Tate had done. "Ruth Dagher," she told him. 

The enemy of the King Undying gave her a slow, charming wink. "John Kovacs. A pleasure."

"Oh no," Mercy reassured him, staccato. "The pleasure is all mine."

What she would remember most precisely from this moment is not the story he told her about his first time drinking here, or the delighted smiles he sent her way like he was surprised to find that she had not dissipated into mist each time he looked away. Instead she would remember the sharp rattle of the glass hitting the table when the server set it down too hard - the moment when she hoped it would shatter.

It was easier than she'd thought, to become this other person. The person who laughed at jokes in this bar and offered demure smiles when questioned too closely about her alarmingly flimsy cover. Kovacs didn’t press too hard, didn’t give the impression of caring too strongly about how she  _ ended up on this pile of dirt, darling _ .

The abundance of empty glasses on the table warned her that the night was getting older. She had to get to work. "Are you stationed here?" she asked as carelessly as she dared.

He gave her a slow grin, like he thought she was an idiot. "No, sweetheart. I'm on leave. Ship out tomorrow."

Mercy took another sip of the truly atrocious beverage to cover her interest. "Oh, how sad," she simpered. His smile grew. "And we're only just getting acquainted."

"I guess we better use all the time we have, huh?"

Mercy wished acutely that Cytherea were present, so that she could exchange a disbelieving look with someone. She took another stab at the meat of the information. "Is it a terribly long posting?" She lowered her gaze, mostly to check for any indication that he was armed. "Maybe I'll wait for you."

His eyes glittered. He loved the joke, had loved it all night - the teasing way they were building this imaginary connection. The back and forth between two people who will never see each other again, but liked to pretend that they would. 

"A few years, at least. But it won't be fun, Ruthie." He sighed, signaling for another round. "It's on a dead planet. Just me and five hundred other suckers. No real expectation of action, since those sons of bitches aren't likely to come back to a place they already nuked, but we gotta do everything we can to make it livable."

Mercy felt her smile freeze. "A dead planet?" she asked through numb lips.

"Yeah. It'll be about as fun as it sounds."

She accepted a fresh drink and nodded at something else he said, allowed the proprietary hand on her thigh. For the first time since she left on the shuttle, she felt wide awake. Edenites were returning to dead planets. To do what? Conduct training? Research into the thanergy that the necromancers had left in their wake?

She schooled her tone into some semblance of carelessness. “I thought those places were basically unlivable.”

Kovacs leaned closer, breath warm at her ear, like he was sharing a secret. “They are. Basically.” His mouth twitched. “But we installed a settlement there a few years back, mostly people who fought the Dead Empire and survived. We figure there’s a lot to be learned there. If we can manage to find a weakness out of their sight, all the better. You need to know necromancy to kill it.”

Over the clatter of her heart, Mercy asked, “What’s the name of the settlement?”

John Kovacs told her, “Hazor,” and brushed his lips very lightly over her cheek.

~ 💀~

Mercy thought that she'd forgotten how to feel this kind of anger, but it thrummed in her veins all the same like a lost lover. Thump thump thump in the blood pushing in her temple and wrist. Kovacs's hand was warm and slightly sweaty where it held hers, his expression sly. They walked down halls carved of stone, their footsteps muffled by the red carpets, and Mercy thought about how easy it would be to kill them all. How much they would deserve it.

Instead she let herself be pulled into the dim room that Kovacs had been renting while on leave. Sparsely decorated to begin with, it looked even emptier with all personal effects packed up in a heavy canvas bag. It leaned in the corner by the door like a tired sentry. Mercy told herself it would make the search easier. Kovacs likely already packed his shipment instructions. She wouldn’t have to turn over the room.

"Ruth," Kovacs murmured into her shoulder, and, lost in thought, Mercy reacted just a little too late. She closed her eyes and leaned her forehead against his mouth, submitting to the gentle but insistent kisses he was peppering against her skin. This time, when he said the name again, she smiled. She thought about the shape that his mouth made when he said,  _ kill it _ , how flat his eyes looked. Like he was talking about weeding out a pest.

She bit into the anger like a raw heart, and swallowed it.

"Come on, it’s only a few hours until sun-up," Ruth told him, light. As she spoke, she began to toe off her shoes, leaning against him for support. The rug was plush, dragging her deeper into the room, inviting her to stay.

Kovacs was already nodding, answering her smile with one of his own, playing the game. "Yes, you're right, I wouldn’t want to be late." His jacket fell across a nearby chair in a pool of heavy linen, his shirt not far behind. For a moment, his face was in shadow, and Ruth felt herself truly shiver for the first time all night. "They'll be so angry," he said, fingers at his trousers and teeth on display, "if I keep them waiting."

They moved quickly after that, stumbling over one another and laughing, playing up the game of young lovers. It didn't take long to unwind the belt of the trousers that could have slowed a bullet but not this, not this. 

In memory, the scene is syrupy and slow - a moment trapped in amber. Kovacs's features are etched into her recollection and lit by gallery lights, stark and clear. Of all the people she's forgotten, he isn't one of them. But here his face is blurred by the gauzy light that flits through the curtains, his hair both lighter and darker than reality. No true memory exists of the feel of his skin or the taste of his mouth. What did he sound like?

In memory, it doesn't matter. All that matters is what he did; what they both did together. The unwilling participant in a game that Ruth played with Mercymorn, spinning round and round in her head.

What Mercy told herself later was: he could have been anyone. What Ruth said then, fingers in his hair, teeth against his throat was: "John. Come on." And then, sweetly, "Please." 

Mercymorn does not beg. But Mercymorn, you see, was not there.

Kovacs was saying something again, a string of words she could barely understand, and she realized he'd stopped only when he pulled her hand from his hair and laced their fingers together one by one, like a lover's. Ruth wasn't sure what her face showed him, but it made him laugh a little. "I live to surprise," he told her. He seemed young and pleased, on the brink of a great and glorious future in a war that had reared his people for generations.

Mercy thought, _ You have murdered those who love the King Undying. _

Ruth arched her back and tightened her hold on his hand until they were palm to palm, no air between them, no light breaking through. With great intent, she fucked herself back onto him, which earned her a sharp hissing breath but not much more. "I live to be surprised," she said, and moved again.

Kovacs held her hand the whole time he fucked her, pushed into the mattress so high over her head that her arm was starteding to ache, but Ruth didn't complain. The discomfort, slight as it was, served as an anchor against whatever it was she was starting to feel deep in her belly. If she focused on that, she would stay here and not drift away. She wouldn't burn up. She would just float, and let herself breathe heavily against each thrust, and watch the deep flush across Kovacs's chest like an oil spill.

"I need," he was panting quietly, "I just need..."

Ruth lifted her eyes to his. "What do you need?"

"I don't know - more." He sounded so plaintive, like a child. So lost to his own pleasure. And, almost without thinking, Ruth gave him more.

Just a little push; a nudge against the nerve endings in the small of his back, jumping across synapses over his spine. She allowed herself to feel the thalergy building in every push of exertion, the thanergy in his flesh as dozens of cells died every moment. She lit them up gently, tenderly - she barely meant to do it. He had just asked, and she had given.

Kovacs made a sound that was almost pain, sharp and shuddering out of his throat. His knee thumped violently against the mattress and the jerk of their hands was so sudden that Ruth gasped. For a moment, she lived in the crush of his fingers against her hand, their slide down to wrap tightly around her wrist. It would bruise almost immediately. It would have to.

Except it wouldn't.

"Hey," she whispered, untangling them. Her heart hammered in her chest. She put both hands on either side of Kovacs's face and lifted him up to meet her gaze. He blinked back at her, stunned. Then his gaze slid slowly to her wrist.

"You-" he began to say, but Ruth was already shaking her head. With an effort, she dragged back the healing process, letting the blood come to her skin until it left it a vivid, beautiful red in the exact shape of his fingers. She let him see it for a moment, laughing uneasily. She still felt flushed and unsteady, high on her orgasm and the way she'd pushed - demanded - his. 

Kovacs barely glanced at her wrist, eyes tracking her face with intent. They sat staring at one another. "I'm going to take a shower," he said after a moment. He didn't wait for a reply. As he got up, he gave a quiet, slightly hysterical laugh, but didn't look at her again. 

The second that she heard the sonic cleaner turn on, Mercy shot out of the bed and made straight for the neatly packed rucksack by the door. Even muffled by the rug, her footsteps felt too loud.

It had to be in an easily accessible place, she reasoned, unzipping the pockets that ran up the side of the bag. It took her three false tries, but her fingers wrapped around the datapad just the bathroom went silent. Wireless transfer took five seconds, which was annoying on a good day and could turn very ugly now. With surprise, Mercy realized that her fingers were shaking.

It felt like the longest five seconds of her life.

By the time the bathroom door opened, Mercy's trousers were on and she was shrugging the blouse over her head, careful of the cuffs. "So sorry, got to go," she said. "Thanks for a great time, etcetera."

Kovacs watched her, his expression unreadable. He made no move to stop her. "I'll see you when I get back, maybe?" he offered somewhat limply. 

Mercy tucked her still-shaking hands into her trousers and offered him a smile that she hoped was appropriately pleased about this concept. His flinch was barely perceptible. Well, Augustine always said she was shoddy at acting. 

"Next drink is on me," Mercy promised, and fled.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter-specific CW: trauma, sexual content.  
> [say hi](http://lyhoradka.tumblr.com) on tumblr!


	2. DUST TO DUST

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please refer to the end notes for content warnings relevant to this chapter.

_ For I desired mercy, and not sacrifice: and the knowledge of God more than holocausts. _

(Hosea 6:6)

Hazor was a dead planet. 

There was no security system to stop her, no alarm to ring. Mercy landed the shuttle in the field outside the last confirmed settlement, and stumbled out as though pulled by a string.

It stank of thanergy. It wafted off in waves like a burnt pastry, still smoking from the fire of the Cohort's assault. Ravaged was the only word for it. No - devastated. Its soul had been ripped out cleanly but brutally, no ounce of mercy offered. The thanergy was slowly leaking away, approaching the day when Hazor would be just a piece of rock floating around its star.

The Cohort must have been here, what, seventy five years ago? Seventy eight? Ulysses was in this neck of the woods then, serving his turn on the roster of preparing ground for Cohort engagement. He'd done a decent job, Mercy thought vaguely. There was barely anything here, the remnants of it busy dying. 

There should have been nothing here.

The terrible thing was that she was wrong - this was no military encampment. She had no doubt that they worked against the Emperor, but she could not deny, too, that they were building some kind of home here. Some echo of a place like Machaerus and First House in the houses and schools and hospitals that they were constructing brick by brick.

It was a town of at least five thousand people, concentrated in the ruins of the largest city built on Hazor before its residents were either evacuated or prevented from doing so by the Emperor's Holy Fingers, Holy Gestures. Mercymorn snuck in like a thief, shock giving way to numb awe. She prowled the city all night, thinking over and over: they had come back.

The fact was that the Emperor’s enemies did not live on dead planets. In the same way that necromancers lost pieces of themselves when they lacked thanergy to practice with, those who had not been born of the Resurrection slowly withered when life was denied them. The very act of existing on a planet with its soul ripped to shreds would waste the people who resided there. 

Mercy plastered herself against the nearby wall, watching a door open at the corner of the street. Two figures, giggling and holding hands. One of them said something in a whisper, then they both laughed and kissed, over and over - so lightly and happily that even Mercy could see it. They separated like a heart splitting, then came back together for one last kiss before one figure finally tore themselves away and sauntered down the street, waving. After a few moments, the door closed and plunged the street in darkness.

_ It will not come back _ , Mercy wanted to tell them. They knew - they must have known that there was no life to be found here. The Cohort had plundered this place. Some things you don't come back from.

Some things you don't survive.

She stumbled back to the shuttle in a daze, her heart hammering in her throat like a jackrabbit. The thanergy sang at her from Hazor's core. She had never been so aware of it. 

Hazor had no moon to reflect the light of its sun, so at this time of night the only light came from the stars. Mercy looked out over the slumbering city, unseeing. She felt the cool metal of the shuttle at her back, where she sat leaning against it. She thought about the way night looked on First House, the darkness encroaching and receding at the Moon's whim. She thought about the Emperor's hands shaking in holy wrath at the sin committed in his House, the blood spilled by Edenite forefathers and then Resurrected by those same shaking hands.

She thought about Officer John Kovacs' orders to arrive at his post on planet Hazor with five hundred armed soldiers to protect a dying place from those who had killed it.

From a few meters away came a rustle and a barely audible gasp. Mercy startled so badly that she slammed her head against the shuttle and hissed in pain, rising to her feet like a cobra. She scrambled to turn on the shuttle lights with one hand. Her sword hand was already reaching for her rapier. 

The intruder swore as the lights flickered and turned on, blinding them both. Mercy, ready for it, shut her eyes for a second on initial impact. When she opened them, the immediate area was ablaze in the floodlight. 

Her would-be attacker hunched against the shuttle, arm thrown over his face, breathing heavily. In five short steps, Mercy covered the ground between them and wrapped her fingers around his throat. She pushed the edge of the rapier against his side until he felt the blade and shuddered, breath rattling in his chest. The rapier was mostly for show; he couldn't have known that the real threat was Mercy's touch.

"Please," he choked out. He swallowed once, compulsively, his Adam's apple bobbing against Mercy's palm. His eyes were wide and colorless in the shadows. "Please, I'm sorry, I don't mean you any harm."

Mercy pushed the rapier closer. "I would imagine not," she said, saccharine. "Just your luck to be out here at this time of night, hm?"

The boy - and it was a young boy, Mercy saw, spots of adolescence on his chin and cheeks, not a wrinkle at his eyes; the boy shuddered and asked, "Are you here to kill us?"

Mercy paused. "Why?"

"You're not from the City," the boy said. Brave. Stupid. "And this is an Edenite shuttle, but you came here alone. So you must be one of them."

"Them?"

"The death witches."

Slowly, Mercy stepped back. She sheathed the rapier. She heard herself ask, as though from a great distance, "What's your name?"

The boy hesitated for a long time, but eventually he admitted, "Jonah." Mercy took the time to look him over - the sturdy dark coveralls, the threadbare boots, the synthetic coat that he'd tucked around himself to ward off the chill. He was still shaking against the wall of the shuttle, but Mercy was willing to bet her rapier that it was from fear rather than cold. She wondered why the boy wasn't running. He probably expected to die before he took two steps.

"You think I came here alone, a mere death witch," her mouth curved in distaste around the term, "to level a settlement of thousands of people all by myself?" She crossed her arms. "I must be very powerful."

"Aren't you? Here to kill us?"

Mercy didn't answer.

Reading all he needed in that lack of reply, Jonah shuddered and sank to the ground. "I don't want to die," he said simply. He wasn’t begging, not yet. Mostly, he seemed to still be in shock.

"No. Most people don't." Mercy looked at Hazor looming a few miles away. She didn’t feel shock anymore. She just felt cold. "You know, no one knows I'm here," she admitted, laughing a little. It sounded hollow to her own ears, like the parody of laughter that Augustine liked to toss around. "I didn't know anyone would be here at all."

Jonah looked up at this. "So you don't have to -- do what you did before?" 

Mercy rolled her eyes. Hope springs eternal. "You know, baby, I haven't decided yet." The silence stretched like taffy, thin in the floodlight of the shuttle. Mercy wished that she had thought to steal Kovacs' cigarettes along with the location coordinates. "I could leave, I guess," she mused. "Just pretend I never saw you. This isn't a military base. I don't have an assignment to wipe you off the map. Again."

Another silence. "You're about to say that you can do that, but you won't," Jonah said. "Aren't you?"

Mercy bared her teeth. She was tired, so tired, of this tediousness. "You are the grandchild of murderers, chickadee,” she snapped. “Every person in that city breathes this foul air as a dishonor to the God of Dead Kings. The blood you fight for is the blood that brought destruction to a homeland to which you will never, ever return.”

Had she been kinder, she would have pitied this child for never knowing the roots from which he had been cut, the knife wielded by his ancestors. But the Saint of Joy was not very kind. She was, however, very old, and very angry, and lonelier than a child could ever understand. For the briefest of moments, she allowed herself to feel what she had shied away from on Machaerus: homesickness. 

But there is no going home again, not for this child, and not for her.

“You have abandoned Eden, for which you've suffered.” Her voice was an earthquake, shaking him. “You have abandoned your kin, and they have drowned in blood. You live because your forefathers killed their siblings.  _ They, like Adam, have transgressed the covenant, there have they dealt treacherously against me. _ "

Jonah was crying softly into his hands.

Mercymorn felt God in her mouth, her tongue aflame. She sucked in air, dizzy with it. It had not felt like that since the beginning, since she was called Disciple but not yet Saint. She wanted to sit down next to this boy and weep. She wanted to strike him down for the sin he carried in his bones. 

Instead, Mercymorn said: "It hurts, you know. Dying. It's no picnic." She took a step closer to him and allowed herself the sick satisfaction of watching the child flinch away violently. "And when the Lord in his mercy resurrects you, it hurts even worse," she continued. "I don't mean just your body. You ever wonder what happens to your soul when you die, Jonah?" She waited until he nodded slightly. "It leaves your flesh and bones, and goes for a little swim in the River with all the other souls who were stabbed in the back, or choked on a bone, or departed sweetly in their sleep at tender old age. But imagine what would happen, you idiot child, if someone wanted to kill a city."

The boy gritted his teeth against the whimper, but it broke through like an animal, wild with fear. Mercy did not stop.

"Thousands of souls plunging into the River, all at once. What about a continent dead all at once? A planet? Billions and billions of souls, Jonah, torn away from the mortal coil to drown forever in the great currents, cheek to cheek. And a solar system. A star." Mercy felt twenty nine years old and alive and dead and alive again. God's hands on her face as she knelt at his feet, His face blurring through her tears. "Tell me," said the Saint of Joy, the Holy Hand of the Great Resurrection, "that you deserve to live after that."

"Please," said Jonah, shuddering. It seemed they finally got to the begging stage. "I have a sister."

Mercy sneered. "I had sisters, too. Brothers and sisters who have died to put this sword in my hand and through the throat of miserable, murdering worms like you."

"But I didn't kill them," said the boy. his voice echoed empty and confused between them. "I didn't kill them," he repeated. And then, stronger: "I don't deserve this."

Mercy felt her vision go red. "Then who does?" she demanded, unyielding. 

Then she reached for the empty place at the center of the planet, the molten heart that was the absence of its soul, and she tore Hazor into pieces.

It was a real low point for Mercy personally, all things considered.

~ 💀~

1 DAY AFTER THE SECOND DEATH OF HAZOR

Ulysses knew how to throw a party with the same expertise that Cassy showed about the River and Augustine demonstrated in being an insufferable worm. Ulysses knew how to throw a party the way Cytherea knew how to out-dress a confectionery. 

Ulysses knew how to throw a party like a house on fire, which was really saying something in oxygen-depleted space.

"Mercy, my dear," he had said kindly three month ago. "If you do not appear in full regalia at my lovely bash, over which I have fretted day and night, I will be very cross with you. But not to worry!" He attempted to kiss her cheek, which she dodged so adeptly she almost suffered the same warm embrace from a wall. "I know that won't be necessary because you will certainly not let me down!"

And now here they were.

"Oh!" Cassy exclaimed. "Champagne!" 

Ulysses bowed, pleased as punch. Mercy cast a critical eye over the booze and was relieved to discover white wine lurking behind the champagne. Augustine's preferred red was on the other side of the bar, with scotch and whiskey dominating the middle. Some artistic soul had arranged tiny platters of sandwiches on either side, like wings. Everything glittered and sparkled and blinded anyone with eyes, which seemed to be Ulysses' main goal as far as his shindigs went. If people could see, they would leave.

Cytherea fell into the room from what had appeared to be a wall, but upon closer inspection revealed a reflective tapestry that cleverly hid her mode of entrance. She'd chosen unexpectedly sleek attire for the evening, and was currently adjusting the line of a dress of such revolting yellow satin that it looked like she'd been dipped in radioactive sunflowers.

"Goodness," she said, cool as a cucumber. "I haven't been to a sexy party in ages."

Mercy felt herself go rigid. "Ulysses," she began ominously.

The traitor lifted his chin, unrepentant. "Oh come off it, Mercy, you look like I've stuck a rapier up your ass. This is a team-building activity."

Cytherea shot her a cunning look over his shoulder. "So happy you could make it," she said. “I was so worried that you would be late.”

Mercy had, in fact, been late. "Would you have really drank my wine?"

"Don't doubt it, darling." Cytherea plucked a glass of the aforementioned wine from the table, and handed it over with a delicate bow. "Now where the fuck have you been?"

"Oh you know," Mercy said. "Here and there." She brought the glass to her lips, and avoided Cytherea’s gaze with a deftness born from four millennia’s experience. She still felt a phantom weakness deep in her marrow, unsteady with it. Lyctors so rarely approached the limit of their power, but a few thousand deaths was no small feat.

They gathered slowly over the course of the night, drifting in one by one as though they stumbled in on accident. The Emperor arrived not long before Mercy, Cyrus on his heels. Gideon slunk in with great reluctance, but he was not one to complain. Unsurprisingly, Gideon valued a group activity. Augustine made an appearance last, hours after they started the real festivities; so late, in fact, that Mercy was beginning to suspect she might get to see Ulysses deliver on the threats he'd made to each of them.

Augustine looked like shit.

He wore the same style of tuxedo he'd preferred before the Resurrection, his bow tie crisp and his suit falling in clean lines down his body. His hair was swept back, perfectly combed but for a strand that curled rakishly against his temple in a way that appeared accidental, which meant that it was precisely engineered.

Mercy had seen his god-forsaken face with some regularity for nigh on four thousand years. And in spite of the pretty trappings, he looked very, very close to the wire.

Before anyone could say a word, Cassy swept up with shocking coordination, plucked a clean glass and a bottle of something amber from the side-table, and met Augustine near the door. Mercy watched them, her head cocked to the side. Cassy's back was to her, so Mercy got an excellent view of Cassy's ass in that dress and no indication of what she was saying to Augustine as she poured him a drink and held it out. Augustine grimaced briefly, knocked the whole thing back in one go, and gave Cassy a tight nod. 

Cytherea appeared at Mercy’s side, making herself comfortable on the plush bench, and sniffed. “How long has  _ that  _ been going on?” she asked, the unrepentant gossip.

Mercy balked. “Augustine and  _ Cassy _ ?”

Cytherea gave her a pitying look. “No, my little fool. Augustine and Ulysses.” 

She nodded in the general direction of where Ulysses was strumming at a guitar that had seen better days, his eyes on the scene by the door. Augustine disentangled himself from Cassy, poured another drink, and crossed the room. Ulysses said something, smilingly slowly, and gestured at the glass in Augustine’s hand. Augustine held it out. Ulysses, not lifting a finger, made a great show of taking a drink while Augustine still held the glass.

Mercy and Cytherea watched this with the rapt attention of a pair of crones whose only entertainment in life was fighting a war and following the interpersonal drama of six other elderly assholes.

“Ulysses will break his heart,” Cytherea said wisely, and refilled her glass.

“You underestimate the Saint of Patience,” came God’s voice over their shoulders. Both of them jumped.

“My Lord?” said Mercy. 

John waved at her. “Skooch.”

She skooched.

Now three of them, they returned to gossip.

On the other side of the room, Ulysses strummed the guitar. And then he began to sing.

“Oh shit,” said Cytherea. “It’s Anastasia’s song.”

Ulysses’ voice was low, a little rough around the edges. He was showy in many things, but not in this. 

“It was always more Samael’s, I think. He wrote it,” said John. He sounded, as he always did when the subject of their last Lyctor came up, deeply rueful. Mercy had realized how much he loved all of them when she saw the way he loved and mourned Anastasia.

As Ulysses continued to sing -  _ I won’t lie to you, I won’t lie; when the water comes, we won’t survive _ — Augustine made his round of the room until at last he came to a stop before them. Cytherea deigned to accept a light kiss on the cheek in greeting. Mercy arched an eyebrow, and said, “What happened to  _ you _ ?”

As though on cue, the obnoxious ping of a message alert came from John’s pocket. John frowned and fished out the device. His Saints shared a long-suffering look; they had been on a campaign to convince him to change the ringtone for years.

“Beg your pardon,” said the Emperor upon glancing at the screen, and withdrew. As he passed Cassy, he said something to her that made her turn pale and follow him. The door shut firmly behind them.

Augustine took the freshly vacated seat. 

“While you have been shopping for wines and wasting the Emperor’s time, we lost two warships,” he said. He deposited his empty glass on the floor, and produced his ever-present rolling papers. “Six hundred and fifty two lives lost last week.”

Mercy, who still had the dirt of Hazor under her fingernails, said, “Fuck you.”

Ulysses had finished the song. He called, “Please refrain from killing each other at my party. Again.”

Not even bothering to look up, Augustine began to deftly roll a cigarette. “Oh, please, my dear girl, stop with the theatrics. You haven’t held command in almost two hundred years.” He shrugged at her glare. “I’m not wrong.”

“Lord forbid you would admit it if you were,” Mercy snapped. She rose sharply, the wine precarious close to sloshing out of the glass. A voice that sounded dangerously like Cristabel’s told her,  _ He couldn’t possibly know that you have done your duty, and more besides. This is all really quite irrational.  _ She told it to go stuff itself. 

Ulysses was still humming Anastasia’s song when she passed him. It all seemed like too much, too bright, too loud. 

Behind her, Cytherea was saying, in accusing tones, “It’s both your fault, you know.”

As she turned to close the door, Mercy caught one last sight of them. Augustine was watching her, eyes sharp but expression thoughtful. Mercy held his gaze for a tremulous moment, then turned away.

~ 💀~

1 WEEK AFTER THE DEATH OF ANASTASIA THE FIRST

Mercymorn didn't cry until much later. 

She allowed her hands to be kissed and her name to be whispered among the newly born Ninth House, their faces awed and frightened. They called her beloved Saint, reverent. She wanted to claw at their eyes. She wanted to scream. She wanted the Lord to take pity and give Anastasia one more breath, and then one more. And then just one more after that.

They left the King Undying sitting by the grave of Saint Anastasia and her faithful Samael, chatting as though they would awaken any moment and laugh at his jest. They were alone - just a King and a corpse who died at his bidding with his love in her heart. 

Mercy couldn't bear to beg. Anastasia would so hate it if she begged. So she boarded the ship with the rest of their family, and left her saint-sister behind.

It was Cassiopeia who found her, curled up on the uncomfortable metal seats in the starboard lounge. Cassy's eyes were red-rimmed and her hair pulled back, and the touch of her hand on Mercy's shoulder was too much. 

She didn't say anything. Just sat with her fingers warm and tight as Mercy cried with great, heaving sobs that made her head hurt. Taken from us too soon, they say at funerals. Anastasia had almost two centuries in the world, but she spent most of them in terrible pain. Mercy wondered if she absorbed some of it when they put Anastasia in the ground. It couldn't be hers, this terrible agony. It couldn’t come from a place inside her - she wasn’t capable of it. She had cried all her tears when she put Cristabel into the ground. She had razed that place within her that could feel a pain like this. 

Cassy put her head on Mercy’s shoulder, and let her hand brush gently against Mercy’s neck again and again. “She told me that she was glad that at least-” her voice caught and she cleared her throat, pressing her face into Mercy’s collarbone. “She said at least she died at home. That she was glad of it.”

Mercy closed her eyes. “She’ll be the last to die at First House,” she said.

How horribly wrong she was.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter-specific CW: violence against a teenager, war crimes (not being facetious about this), blasphemy, mass murder (off-screen).  
> The song that Ulysses sings in this chapter is "Not Changing, Pops, Seeking" as performed by Oscar Isaac. I'm pretty sure it's only available on YouTube as of this moment.  
> [say hi](http://lyhoradka.tumblr.com) on tumblr!


	3. SCHWARZSCHILD RADIUS

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> No content warnings apply to this chapter.

_For though I should walk in the midst of the shadow of death, I will fear no evils, for thou art with me. Thy rod and thy staff, they have comforted me._

(Psalm 22:4)

58 YEARS AFTER THE SECOND DEATH OF HAZOR

The last thing Cyrus said had been, "I’m sorry, John. Amen." 

The last time Mercy had seen him, he had been strapping on his gauntlets and nodding at something that Gideon was saying in his low, gravely voice. Number Six hunted them, looming on the horizon. Augustine and Cytherea had disappeared two hours ago, and would not re-appear for hours more, except for brief flashes of them in the River like piranhas. The Emperor was already locked away. He would not hear his Hand’s prayer. 

Cyrus looked up as Mercy approached, and flashed her a quick smile. On impulse, she lifted her hand and brushed her fingers against the last buckle on his gauntlet, only millimeters away from his skin. She will spend decades thinking about that space - the fact that in the end, she hadn't truly touched him. 

The black hole that swallowed Cyrus the First had a Schwarzchild radius of 4.21 kilometers.

Mercy played that number again and again on a loop: four point two one. His coffin was empty, because his body had been torn apart by the same force that finally killed the Resurrection Beast that he had dragged in with him. 

If Cristabel were here, she would say that Cyrus died to save the universe from that Beast. She would say that perhaps he would have been glad to go this way. But Mercy knew better. Cyrus died for God, just like Anastasia. Just like Cristabel herself.

As would they all, eventually. 

~ 💀~

2 YEARS AFTER THE DEATH OF CYRUS THE FIRST

The aide that they had sent to fetch her was a stout, square-jawed woman with a wisp of blond hair and a resolute expression. Mercy wondered how long ago she had graduated from basic as the aide made a visible effort not to shift her weight under the unimpressed gaze of the Saint of Joy.

"Saint of Saints," the aide began bravely. "Our most gracious Emperor requests your presence in the meeting room."

"At the meeting?" Mercy inquired. This was a trap.

"In the meeting room, Holy Finger, Holy Thumb." The aide studiously trained her gaze two inches to the left of the head of the Holy Finger, Holy Thumb. "At once."

Mercy narrowed her gaze. "So he doesn't want me at the meeting?"

The aide swallowed. "No, I believe the Emperor intended a conference after the meeting. With his most holy, most blessed Saint of Joy," she added, a little desperately. It did lift one's spirit to see that flattery as a response to terror was still the done thing at the Cohort.

Nonetheless, the most holy Saint of Joy did not deign to respond to this. She strode out of the room at a brisk walk, sending privates scuttling out of her way as she ascended to the meeting room. The implied request that her person were absent from the Admiralty meeting was puzzling, made all the worse by the fact that the Emperor had somehow manipulated her into feeling disgruntled over missing an Admiralty meeting in the first place. There were times she would have sliced off her own hand to avoid them.

The P.A. system startled Mercy out of her thoughts with a soft ping, and a breathy voice announced, "The most venerated Saint of Patience has seen fit to grace Dock 3." 

Mercy bared her teeth. 

So. It seemed Augustine had not been invited to the meeting either.

Before she could find a convenient garbage chute and duck into it, or otherwise remove her person from Dock 3, the iridescent shimmer of Augustine's Lyctoral robe appeared, followed by the man himself. He arched an eyebrow, but otherwise did not seem surprised to see her. Mercy stepped away from the wall with as much grace as she could muster.

"Well, well," Augustine said. His teeth were as white as ever, the shape of his smile the same. How long has it been since they last spoke a word to one another? "And I thought I might get lucky and the old bastard would pair me off with Gideon, or even Cytherea. Or literally anyone marginally more useful." He said all this cheerily, like a neighbor leaning over the fence to share gossip. "Unless you're here by unlucky coincidence?"

Mercy snapped, "No," which may or may not have been true. They glowered at each other, Augustine with vile humor and Mercy obviously caught uninformed.

"Ulysses sends his love," she added, hoping to needle him even a little. 

Augustine did not disappoint. He crossed his arms over his chest, the robe rippling in the ugly florescent lighting of the ship, and flattened his mouth into a thin line. "Does he," he said. "When did you see him?"

"A few months ago. He's sick of ship-hopping, so he's settling down to drink himself stupid on a fringe planet."

"And you didn't stay to keep him company?"

"How could I?" Mercy asked, sweet and rotten. "When he's so busy pining for you."

Augustine's eyes went cold. 

After two decades playing tag on various Cohort postings and convalescing entirely alone at the Mithraeum for an uninterrupted three months (a period of time that most Saints pretended did not happen, else they would have to ponder the effectiveness of the cleaning detergents), Augustine and Ulysses’ affair came to a spectacular end. Ulysses, ever the romantic, grew bored. Augustine, whose only love was the devotion he carried to God and perhaps also his suits, was too busy leading armies.

And then they fought Number Six, and Cyrus had died, and it had all splintered the way it did when they buried Anastasia. They were idiots, that was all. They had fought two Resurrection Beasts and lived, and thought themselves unbreakable.

"My Saints," said the Emperor presently, shattering the icy silence. He stood at the end of the hall, smiling benevolently. The Admiralty milled about; the meeting had obviously just concluded. "A moment of your time?"

As one, Mercy and Augustine turned and followed him into the room. 

They entered a conference room like any other, on any other Cohort ship. The chairs were welded to the long conference table, its surface the dark screen of a panel turned off. The one luxury was the windows. They covered most of a wall, looking out into cold space. 

The Necrolord Prime closed the door, and turned to look at his disciples.

Augustine broke the silence first. "You didn't tell Joy what this is about, did you?" he asked. 

The Emperor made a face. "I apologize," this was to Mercy, "there was no time. I had meant to ask the Saint of Duty but he has been...detained."

"Ask him for what?" 

The Emperor paused, then crossed over to the table and lit up its surface with a swipe of his holy fingers. He spent some time typing in a series of codes, saying, "Something's come up. I was hoping that we could wait to deal with it. Or, frankly, I was hoping nothing like this would happen at all." The screen let out a soft ping, then narrowed to fit in the edge of the table closest to the Emperor. Augustine made himself comfortable in the nearby chair. 

"We seem to have a traitor among our number," said the Emperor.

Mercy froze.

Augustine looked unsurprised.

She whirled on him. "You knew?"

"I discovered it," he replied, cold.

The Emperor went on. "The Cohort carried out a number of attacks on targets that appear to have been carefully vetted, and yet when we arrived on these planets they were empty. On one occasion, remnants of military action were found, but the structures were obviously abandoned at least eight hundred years ago. The Admiralty is not happy. It is, as you can imagine, a tremendous waste of resources."

Augustine's pinched expression made it clear whose resources had been wasted, and how it came to be that he discovered the presence of this mole. "Someone is feeding us false intel," he said. "Someone good enough to fool the Admiralty, and stupid enough to think that this is worthwhile."

"It might be worthwhile," said the Emperor, mild. "Fact of the matter is - we don't know. We don't know from what they have distracted us, if distraction was indeed the goal."

Mercy finally found her voice. "Why wasn't I told?"

"You're being told now," said Augustine, snide as ever.

Before Mercy could express even a fraction of what she thought about this, the Emperor held up his hand. "There was no reason to tell you," he said, reading her face perfectly. "Until now."

She sputtered. "No - no reason!"

"Mercy."

"Am I not your Sword?" she hissed. "Am I not your Hand and Gesture? Have I not sworn to be your Shield?"

The Emperor looked at her strangely. "No," he said. "You didn't." 

Augustine cleared his throat. "If I may interrupt." 

When Mercy glanced up, he was watching her like he was working out a puzzle, brow furrowed. In the tepid light, half-cast by the screen, it made him look painfully young. Or rather - it made him look like his brother.

Alfred had said, once: _To be One is to be each other's Shield. We shield the other as we shield our own hearts._

It had made Valancy laugh, head thrown back, her beautiful mouth open. _Always use protection_ , she teased.

Alfred had rolled his eyes. _I hate you and your filthy mind_ , he said, affectionate. 

_It's not my fault you're always making it so easy._

"Mercy?"

The Emperor and the Saint of Patience were staring at her with eyebrows raised. The Emperor looked concerned. Augustine just looked irritated, which was a sight with enough normalcy to it that Mercy reflexively returned his glare and took a seat on the Emperor's unoccupied side.

"Yes, go on. What's the mission?"

The Emperor said, "Alright. Here's the plan."

~ 💀~

They were going to be, in essence, squatting. The dormitory was obviously meant to house several families. A living area occupied the center. The rest of the house was split into two sleeping areas and smaller rooms with bathrooms and a big kitchen. There was something like a library, but its shelves stood empty, the center cavernous.

"Home sweet home," said Augustine, and turned down a hall without another word. 

Mercy inspected the musty sofas in the sitting room, and told herself that they were lucky that they weren't camping in the woods. Dust laid in thick layers over everything. The house had never been used, or else used for only a few years. This was one of the sites affected by evacuation.

Mercy revised this impression when she made her way into the bedroom. A small bed stood off to the side, a glorified metal contraption with a mattress so thin that she was tempted to take a ruler to it in order to ascertain that it existed. A screen hung on the wall with its power source ripped out, guts and all. Stacks of dusty fiberglass boxes lined up underneath it.

Curious, Mercy opened one and, to her surprise, discovered books. Actual, real books printed on paper, so dusty that it was nearly impossible to read the covers. The glue had long since dried out, leaving the paper close to crumbling. She took them out gingerly and opened the first one - the cover gave an ominous creak, and detached in her hands.

"Aw, yuck," Mercy muttered. They were medical textbooks. 

She dug around for a while and eventually uncovered a data drive that was the peak of electronic advancement at least a few hundred years ago. She spent about four hours digging through the house and was about to give up all hope when she finally found something in which to stick it. The screen lit up with painful slowness. It was the medical books, scanned and just barely legible. 

"Gross," said Augustine's pleasant voice over her shoulder as she scrolled through startlingly realistic illustrations of dorsal nerve dissection. "Picking up a new hobby, Joy?"

"Maybe I'll practice on you," she replied, just as pleasantly. 

Augustine rolled his eyes and settled on the musty sofa without comment. He leaned his head, the picture of rest, and they sat there in relative quiet for a long time, Mercy reading and Augustine rolling his noxious cigarettes. In the damp dust of the house, the evil smell of it was almost comforting.

Eventually, Mercy became aware of his gaze on her, and looked up to meet it. She blinked at him in question. He squinted in return. It should have been worrying how easily they understood each other through this pantomime. 

"Tomorrow," she answered the unspoken question, and flipped to the next page.

"This isn't a vacation, Joy."

"Could have fooled me." Another page, this one the introduction to a chapter on energy transfer among cells. Mercy made a hm sound under her breath, and hit the bookmark icon with her finger.

"This is weeks of surveillance, and God knows how much time for actual infiltration. I would prefer we get started immediately."

"You poor wilting flower. Can't handle these luxurious accommodations for an extra few hours?"

"Lazy and useless as always, Joy."

"You know, I don't even have to try for it, venerated Saint of Patience."

"Would you believe I'm running low on it at the minute?"

When she looked up, Augustine was almost smiling. His eyes were closed and the corners of his mouth were turned up just a little, not impatient at all. The exchange had no real heat to it. It felt, surprisingly, like old times - the eighteen of them living cheek to jowl with one another, bickering happily over who will read which book next and who will set up tents tomorrow. They had hated each other then, too, but it had been a different kind of feeling. Rivalry, maybe. 

They had both loved the Lord so much that they had ground their kneecaps into dust with kneeling. But it had been a long time since the Emperor had expected anything like that.

Augustine cracked his eyes open, and Mercy realized that she'd allowed the silence to drag on too long. "Tomorrow," she repeated. He shut his eyes again. "We'll get the lay of the land at dawn."

~ 💀~

It took them a week to track down anything useful. Gilboa was an Edenite stronghold, though it had existed long before those fanatics got their claws in. It had been solely a military base a thousand years ago, the only habitable planet in millions of years around. Through sheer luck, the Empire had discovered its location only fifteen years ago, and had made no move to use the information. It was a point of interest, and a great one at that, but they were uncertain of its function and general use to the Blood of Eden proper leadership.

The thing was, the Emperor had told them, no one in the Cohort was supposed to know that Gilboa existed. Not even all of the Lyctors had that information, though it was available to them should they be needed to aid the effort on this side of the galaxy. And yet, half-erased communication logs indicated that signals had been sent from the dreadnought _Dolos_ to this tiny planet, when in fact no one on that dreadnought should have had any idea that this planet existed in the first place. 

"They evacuated at least one third," Augustine said. His tone was crisp and no-nonsense. Mercy made a small, distracted sound of agreement, and jotted down a note on the map they'd put together from fly-by images and three weeks of trawling through the Gilboan forest. 

"Maybe even more," she said. "A third of the population initially - ten years ago? Hard to tell. Probably more since then."

The thing was - they were still evacuating.

The Cohort hadn't known, and the reason for that became clear almost immediately. The evacuation efforts were slow-going, emptying the planet at a crawl. They hadn't seen a single shuttle take off until their fifth day in Gilboa, though it was apparent that the entire city was mobilized. Yards were stacked with storage containers, buildings were routinely scanned and stripped, and people lined up day after day at the facility that functioned as a landing dock. 

On the bright side, this made it easier to blend in. No one looked twice at a stranger when the city was crawling with flight personnel and everyone had better things to worry about. Mercy wore the clothes she'd scrounged up in one of the boxes, though the trousers were too short and the shirt was too tight, and kept her eyes downcast. 

The not-so-bright side was that, frankly, the mole was a bigger problem than they’d realized. Evacuation could happen for all sorts of reasons. Evacuation in secret had only one cause: they knew that the Cohort had caught wind of their presence, and they didn’t want the Cohort to know that they knew.

Their traitor had been very busy indeed.

Their only lead, the Emperor had told them, was the communications signals between the _Dolos_ and a tower on Gilboa. If they had the logs, they could find out who relayed the information. If they knew who relayed the information, they had the mole.

All they had to do was track down the towers - a task that was turning out to be more complicated than anticipated.

Having mapped the layout of the city, Mercy spent the day prowling around in vain hopes of finding even a crumb of anything useful. She hated it here. Everything in Gilboa seemed to be made of steel, a rainbow of gray. Skyscrapers shot toward the sky like needles. Residential areas circled the city in five zones, three of them almost entirely empty. People stood in line at the supermarket, and dragged crying children onto waiting evac shuttles. It was a bizarre mix of half-abandoned and alive, posters advertising the small museum mixed in with announcements regarding evac priority.

None of it pointed at the comm towers.

Mercy arrived at the house empty-handed, which would have been more irritating if Augustine's luck wasn’t about as rotten. They didn't risk going out together. 

In the fifth week, their luck turned. 

Augustine arrived by mid-afternoon, announcing his presence with a loud rattle of the front door. He usually spent some time in his rooms before joining Mercy where she lurked in the library - depressingly, they had a routine - but instead of turning left down the hall, he made his way immediately to the kitchen. Mercy, a cup of disgusting tea halfway to her mouth, paused. 

"You found something."

Augustine flashed a wide, charming grin with more substance than most of his smiles, and which he so rarely tossed Mercy's way. She shifted, discomfited. 

On the table, he deposited a thin plastic card that looked like an outdated access key at first glance. He turned it ninety degrees with a single finger, and Mercy sucked in a breath. It was a visitor's pass assigned to Hugo Schaz. Underneath was an address. Underneath that, in bold letters, Mercy read _Department of Information and Communication_. Jackpot.

"Where did you find this?" she asked, flipping it over. The Blood of Eden crest stared at her from the back of the card. “It cannot possibly be this easy.”

Augustine made himself comfortable across the table, and reached for the tea. "Believe it or not, on the ground. When I was looking at that announcement board outside boarding control for the millionth god-damned time." He took a sip, made a face, then took another. “Someone lost it.”

"You're kidding."

"Nope."

"Well." Mercy replaced the card and picked up her mug again. "It’s been a while since we did a good old-fashioned break-in."

Augustine said, “You know who I miss right now?”

“All I do with my day is wonder what you’re thinking, Augustine,” she told him blandly.

“Ha,” he said, like it was a word. “You crack me up.”

“I try.”

“I miss Anastasia. Now that was a woman who could break any lock.” At Mercy’s disbelieving stare, he laughed. “How do you think she got all those sketchy books that she lugged around? Petty burglary is a small price to pay for knowledge. Scholar, my ass,” he added admiringly.

In spite of herself, Mercy grinned.

~ 💀~

By this point, they were getting used to the fundamental constraint of the gig: they had no idea what they were walking into. 

The Department of Information and Communication turned out to be a squat, nondescript building across the street from an even smaller supermarket. They had expected the streets to be empty but well-lit at night, at least a few security guards on duty. But the lights were out. They didn't see a soul.

They crouched in the narrow gap between buildings about half a block away. The only sound was the methodical grinding of Mercy's molars as she tried to anticipate the shit show they were about to walk into. Augustine jabbed his elbow into her ribs, not moving his eyes off the building. 

"Quit it."

Mercy ground her teeth with increased enthusiasm.

When no guards materialized after twenty minutes, and Augustine was starting to look especially twitchy, they finally crept out from their hiding place. They skirted the building, all their hopes hinged on the guess that the lamps had not been upgraded in the short time since they last took the lay of the land two days ago. If the lights were motion-sensitive, they were fucked.

The lights stayed off. 

At the side service door, Augustine produced a thin shaving of bone. He slid it carefully underneath the door, waited several seconds, and tapped it with his fingers. They heard the loud scrape of the deadbolt sliding on the inside, then the door was pushed open. On the threshold stood a fully formed skeleton.

“You’re getting rusty, with all the time you spend on your spirit energy transfers,” Mercy advised him, charitable as always. Before Augustine could snipe back, she stepped inside.

It was completely, wretchedly dark. Dust settled in thick sheets over every surface, the halls empty and musty. "What the fuck," Mercy whispered. Augustine didn't even shush her. He rolled his shoulders back, first one arm, then the other. Mercy felt a prickling of alarm in her spine.

"It's empty," she added.

"Obviously."

With saintlike patience, Mercy said, "It's been empty. For weeks, at least."

Augustine's tone was grim. "Yeah. What the fuck."

They spent three hours going through every nook and cranny of the place, jumping at every sound and warily creeping through every door. Except for the exterior doors, nothing was locked. File cabinets sat empty, some removed entirely. Room after room turned up void of furniture. Quickly emptied out like a desk drawer, only thin bits of flimsy stuck to the bottom.

No one stopped them as they heaved the service door back in its place. No one ran after them with swords drawn as they wove around the city, splitting up three times. Without a word, they split up for the last time two kilometres from the house. A last precaution. 

First light was breaking when Mercy stepped over the threshold, every inch of her skin crawling. Augustine was already in the kitchen. From the doorway, Mercy took a quick survey of the scene: stale bread in the toaster, fruit preserve on the kitchen table next to the two chipped mugs they've scavenged; Augustine leaning his hands on the counter, gripping it so tightly that his knuckles were white. He didn't turn around, though he must have heard her come in.

Eventually, Augustine spoke. "Go on. Tell me I was wrong."

And God, she wanted to. He was practically begging for it. But a fight with Augustine wouldn't solve anything. With great effort, Mercy said, "We got unlucky."

Silence. 

Mercy had never found herself on this side of comforting Augustine. She didn’t particularly want to do it. In fact, she did think it was his fault that he found a useless address and dragged them to an empty, useless building. She hated this. She hated everything about this.

“We’ll go out again tomorrow,” she said at last, and sat down to have a piece of toast.

Augustine stood by the counter for several minutes. Then he sighed. The chair creaked as he sat down. Exhausted and still keyed up to all hell, they ate in silence.

“I’ll go to the loading docks,” he said when they were finished. “Maybe I’ll look at that notice board some more.”

This was a very un-Augustine attempt at a joke. Or maybe he wasn’t joking. Mercy blinked at him.

“The notice board,” she said, slowly.

He adopted the look of a man who had noticed that she had taken the high road earlier, and was unsuccessfully looking for directions to it himself.

In Mercy’s mind, she saw that board. She saw the schedule of departures. She saw the list of expected hospital closures. But most importantly - 

“Augustine, the city had evacuated so much of its population that they cleared out the Department of Communications. They are closing down supermarkets. They are closing down hospitals. Why would they bother to keep open a _museum_?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [say hi](http://lyhoradka.tumblr.com) on tumblr!


	4. GOODBYE LOVERS AND FRIENDS

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please check the end notes for content warnings relevant to this chapter.

_ Put me as a seal upon thy heart, as a seal upon thy arm, for love is strong as death, jealousy as hard as hell, the lamps thereof are fire and flames. _

(Song of Solomon 8:6)

They knew almost immediately that Mercy had been right - whatever the Edenites were hiding, they had stashed it in the museum. 

They could afford only two days of surveillance before making their plans. The shuttle from the Cohort would arrive for them within four days. They had to make their move now. 

As they plotted, the frustration from their failed stint at the Department of Information did not fade. It hardened, instead, into an uneasy truce. The night before they made their move on the museum, Mercy realized that they had never spent so long together completely alone. They had to make a choice: swallow their four thousand year old desire to claw each other’s faces off, or kill one another in cold blood and thus inconvenience the Emperor quite severely.

“You know, I’ve never had to go undercover with the enemies of the Lord before,” Augustine remarked from where he had been reviewing their blueprints for the eleventh time that day. 

Mercy, still lost in thought, said, unthinking, “I have.”

She felt his attention like a physical weight. “Really? Where?”

“Machaerus,” she said. 

Augustine narrowed his eyes. “I haven’t heard about this. What were you doing there? I thought John had forbidden the Cohort from getting involved.”

Mercy was seriously starting to regret her whimsical slight of camaraderie. “He did,” she admitted.

“Oh shit, Joy. You went against orders? What the fuck did you-”

“It’s how I found out about Hazor.”

“There’s nothing on Hazor. It’s a dead planet.”

“I know.”

Augustine sat forward, intent. “Then what are you -” And then he stopped. 

He caught her gaze and held it. Mercy could see the gears turning in his head. He was always a tactician, no matter what Gideon said. 

“You went to a Blood of Eden stronghold in defiance of the Lord. You followed their intelligence to another planet, and yet you did not bring this information to the Lord. My dear girl,” he said slowly. “That’s treason.”

Mercy flushed, caught. She wanted to say,  _ I killed them. I killed them all.  _ But the words didn’t come.

"Don't tell John," she said. Humiliatingly. 

Augustine looked like he was about to say something, but the words lay frozen in his mouth. In the dim light of the lamp, his hair was half-golden instead of its usual dishwater tint, and his eyes were black. Somewhere between the centuries, Mercy had stopped looking for Alfred in his face. 

In the incandescent fury that ripped them apart after they became Lyctors, Augustine had seemed nothing but a poor imitation of the brother he'd murdered. He ate the space that should have belonged to Alfred; his every action served only to emphasize Alfred's absence. Now, in the tender embrace of grief instead of its airless choke-hold, Mercy found it easier to remember Alfred as he was, even if the memory of his voice or the curve of his cheek escaped her. Alfred's echo no longer lived in the features of his brother's face, and that left Augustine to himself.

Mercy used to be afraid of their cavaliers' ghosts trailing them for thousands of years, but it turns out ghosts have better things to do. It is the living who haunt us.

"I don't understand-" Augustine worked his jaw for a moment, truly bewildered. "I just don't understand why you did it."

"They didn't know me."

"Of course they didn't. Joy, you know who  _ they  _ are. What they've done. You hate them."

Again, she said, "They didn't know me."

In a different voice, Augustine said, "Sometimes I feel like I don't know you either."

And suddenly, they could pretend that it was true.

She stood up haltingly and crossed the room to set her datapad on the desk. From here, she could see the tension in Augustine's jaw.

"Don't you?" Mercy asked.

Augustine brought a hand up to her neck, two fingers at her pulse like he was checking that her heart still beat. It should have been a shock - they touched each other so rarely. But his skin was warm, the weight comfortable against her jugular. 

“Do you ever -” He broke off, looking at her. Mercy saw him make the decision to continue. “Do you ever blame John for what happened?”

“No.”

“No?” She couldn’t read the expression on his face. He slid his hand down her throat and to the joint of her neck and shoulder, heavy. “I did it first, and still I was surprised how much power he held over us. To ask that of us, and expect obedience.”

Mery put her hand over his until he glanced at her again. Into the silence, she said, “He didn’t. We made that decision. We chose to commit that sin. The blame is ours, Augustine.” As she spoke, Augustine’s fingers curled into her shoulder until it hurt. She felt each of them like a brand. “It’s not like you to avoid responsibility. The Lord didn’t make us do anything. We just - we loved him. Will always love him. That’s all.”

With great pity, Augustine said, “You think that isn’t power?”

The moment stretched between them, tense. There was a time she would have killed him for that insolence.

When Mercy let him push her to the desk, she thought about the way her head had felt splitting open against the kitchen table of Canaan House. It had been so dark then, too. His eyes had hurt so much more than any blow ever could. And when he'd hit her, she had thought of Alfred.

This time, when he kissed her, she thought of nothing at all.

The void of him against her mouth felt like relief. She'd never kissed a Lyctor before. If she wanted to map his sinews and chart his bones, she would have to really work for it. If she wanted to feel anything other than the warm puff of his breath against her cheek, she would have to really take the time to dig in deep.

It felt so good to not know him.

"Mercymorn," he whispered.

And Mercy said, "Yes."

~ 💀~

2 DAYS BEFORE THE MURDER OF CRISTABEL OCT

Mercy had kissed Alfred, once. 

The night before they put together the research - the night before Augustine had become the First, and Mercy followed him the way she always did, furious and heartsick. It had been dark in that cold kitchen, and later Mercy would remember that Alfred had a bottle by his hands. Did he know? Could he somehow feel the gravity of what they would do?

"Ah," he said, soft and warm. Just a shadow by the table. "Sweet Mercy."

In spite of herself, Mercy smiled. She always smiled at him, those days. "If Loveday catches you sneaking her pastries, there will be hell to pay, Alf." She felt her way around the table until she was only a foot away, and lowered herself into a chair. He watched her, silent. "Alfred?"

"How long do you think we'd live, with the Emperor by our sides?" he asked.

By then he had begun to speak like Cristabel, as though it were God standing by them instead of the other way around. It raked against Mercy like a knife each time. 

She shrugged. "A few hundred years, I suppose. Maybe a few thousand." 

“And if we are successful in the research?”

Mercy frowned, turning to face him more directly. “Why? Worried we'd get sick of each other?"

"Eternity is such an easy thing to chase. I don't think any of us knows what it means."

"It's just life, Alfred," she said. "The thing we're doing now, just more of it. And anyway, it's what the Lord needs."

It was as easy as that — he needed anything, and she would do it. He was God; he was the man who pulled them out of the River and gave them a purpose. He was the Father who held her in those early days, hands warm on her back. He was the Brother who made her laugh. He was the Lord who gave her purpose. 

Augustine had accused her, time and time again, of being incapable of anything deeper than worship. She always stayed on her knees longer than any of them. But the Prince of Death was everything to them; Augustine didn’t understand that this made him human, too. 

Alfred gave her a slow, measured look. "Maybe it's your love for him that will last forever, not our lives," he said.

A myriad later, on her hand and knees before the Lord, Mercy will look up into Augustine's face, into Alfred's eyes, and remember this. When the King Undying grips her hip, and kisses the dip of her spine, she will think how right he was. 

But now: "I want to see Augustine's face when you say that in front of him."

Alfred's smile gentled, just a bit. A trick of the light. He turned to cradle her cheek in his palm, so light that she barely felt it. "Unlovable Mercy," he whispered, so tenderly that the words felt like a reverse of themselves. "I think God knows that you will love him best, forever. That you would do anything for him."

In a whisper, Mercy asked, “How do you know?”

“Because that’s how Cristabel feels about you.”

And just as Mercy felt her blood run cold, he kissed her.

It was as light and faint as his touch, like a breeze or a drop of water right before a downpour - when you look up at the sky and think you might have imagined it. And then again, a firm pressure this time. Lips closed and warm, no passion, but so much love that it drowned her.

When the world forgets it later, this is what Mercy thinks of: the pressure of Alfred's mouth, and the understanding in it. The truth and history - they were disciples first. The six of them before the eighteen. Before they were necromancers and cavaliers. Before they were Lyctors. They loved the King Undying, and they loved one another.

They would have forgiven each other anything, back then.

~ 💀~

2 YEARS AFTER THE DEATH OF CYRUS THE FIRST

There were two guards. 

They only saw the one, reading in the lobby, his head hanging low as though in sleep. If they were right - and they had to be right, with only a day left on the clock - then there would be at least one more guard inside. 

It turned out to be pathetically easy. This time Augustine held out the bone, and said silkily, “Please, show us how much well you’ve mastered this trick.” Mercy rolled her eyes and took it. 

There were few windows in the building, so they had to make do with the rusty, loud window that led to the staff lounge. They had a brief, heated argument about the risk of taking out the guard versus the risk of drawing attention, which Augustine won with a scathing glare.

Mercy gritted her teeth, half-crawled through the lobby like an idiot, and severed the guard's dorsal nerve with a finger. She quickly crawled back.

Augustine had been examining the maps on the wall behind the receptionist's desk, printed on a large piece of flimsy. It wasn't particularly useful outside of drawing attention to  _ last chance exhibits! _ and the nearby restroom, but it became clear why Augustine was studying it almost immediately. The building stood high above the ground on a thick foundation that indicated a large underground level. The map showed only one floor.

"Oh, look," Mercy said. "They have an exhibit on you." Gleefully, she pointed to the tiny room which proudly held something titled  _ The Ass and Others: Transportation Through the Ages _ .

She was dancing out of the way before Augustine even moved to jab his finger into her side. "Don't worry," he told her sweetly. "They didn't forget you." With the air of great gravitas, he pointed at the architectural exhibit dubiously named  _ Unbalanced and Unhinged _ . A helpful illustration of a building toppling off a mountain perched beside it.

"Same old insults, Augustine," Mercy said, serene. "The centuries have made you dull."

Augustine demonstrated a finger in response.

They hadn’t spoken about last night.

Some tension had broken between them, for better or worse. They moved to the stairs in concert, hands on the pommels of their rapiers. Mercy knew that Augustine would open the door; Augustine knew that she would press her back against the wall when they descended to the bottom of the staircase. 

For all their efforts at stealth, they came face to face with the guard so suddenly that Mercy almost screamed. His hand went to his gun; Augustine’s went for his rapier. Augustine has had more than four thousand years to practice drawing his blade. And even before that, his brother was very, very good.

In a single fluid motion, he slipped the blade between the man’s ribs and immediately out. Just as quickly, he was stepping out of the way of the spray of blood. It came out in a spurt that splashed the stair like water tossed out of a bucket. The guard crumpled.

Mercy and Augustine exchanged a look, and stepped into the room without comment.

For the last Edenite communication tower on the planet, the set-up was sparse. Tall filing cabinets along the walls held, of all things, some kind of preserved stuffed wildlife (”Charming,” commented Augustine, always squeamish when you least expect it). They must have belonged to the museum. Plastic bags held various exhibit equipment. Their quarry took up only a corner of the room, next to a sealed metal box the size of a large pillow.

It was a single comm station, leaning against the corner and locked all to hell. They didn't have time to decrypt anything. They would have to load the whole thing to the drive and hope that someone at the Cohort would be able to crack it. Mercy inserted the drive, waiting with bated breath until it lit up with very faint yellow. It illuminated the logo behind it - the blue circle of the Department of Information. So they weren't completely off base; this must have been transferred here when Blood of Eden emptied the building.

Augustine had been trying to hack through the metal container’s shiny lock. It looked like it was the newest thing in the place. Now he said, "Joy," in an odd voice. Mercy looked up, and stared.

In his hands, the Saint of Patience held a thin wooden box ten by eight inches in size, with no visible hinges or any way to open it. It was the deep brown of dirt, the grain variating only slightly, polished until it gleamed. The light made it impossible to tell if it was real wood, but that wasn't what had Mercy rising to her feet and reaching out, her fingers hovering only centimeters from the box. 

It was covered almost entirely by a blood ward.

"They're working with necromancers," Mercy said. It was impossible. It should have been impossible. She felt like something was stuck in the back of her throat. "Who - did you find anything else?"

With a grimace, Augustine nodded at the container. Inside it, nestled around the place where the wooden box used to be, laid thick sheafs of flimsy covered entirely in writing. They were bound into books. It took Mercy a second to see that they were transcripts. She took the last one off the pile, and flipped through. Her eyes landed on a line.

_ VAKARIAN: -without delay. I have no further information on orders given but I very strongly advise - _

Mercy looked up and met Augustine's cold gaze. 

"We have to signal the Cohort," he said, low. "We have to signal them  _ now _ ."

Mercy felt herself nodding. "Yes, obviously, but Augustine - what the fuck is in that box?"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter-specific CW: canon-typical violence, gore.  
> [say hi](http://lyhoradka.tumblr.com) on tumblr!


	5. APRÈS MOI

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please check the end notes for chapter-specific content warnings.

_ Mercy and truth preserve the king, and his throne is strengthened by clemency.  _

(Proverbs 20:28)

  
  


The moment that they stepped on board the  _ Dolos _ , they were greeted by the sound of a familiar voice chiming over the intercom: "The most holy Saint of Patience and the most venerated Saint of Joy have graced Deck 1." This was the cue for every soul on Deck 1 to pretend very hard that they had an excuse to be there, and to covertly watch as the most holy Saints rushed past. A necromancer in the dark green of the Second Fleet tied his shoe for the full forty seconds that it took them to cross the deck and make a beeline for the Emperor's office.

"The most holy Saint of Patience and the most venerated Saint of Joy have graced Deck 2," heralded the voice placidly. 

"Why did we agree to the announcements? I think it was Cytherea’s idea," Mercy muttered under her breath.

Augustine said, in the same tone of voice, "Gravitas."

Then they were in the room that the Emperor had chosen to conduct his judgment. 

The King Undying stood before what appeared as a lump of laundry, his mouth a flat and terrible line. Upon further inspection, the laundry revealed itself to be a person kneeling with their palms on the ground and their head bowed forward, though whether in pain or supplication was unclear.

"My Saints," said the Emperor. The kneeling person lifted their head just enough to be seen in profile, and Mercy recognized the Senior Aide to Admiral Shepherd. 

As one, Mercy and Augustine bowed their heads. Then Augustine said, "The traitor, my Lord?"

They had sent the message as soon as the shuttle came for them, hours before they could be brought to the Emperor themselves. Mercy packed the medical books; Augustine inspected the warded box and burnt his fingers on it for the fifth time. Now, justice would be served.

"Indeed,” the Prince of Death was saying. His animated, simple face was a mask of ice, his eyes like pools in a frozen lake. “Lady Vakarian has been charged with betrayal of her blood and her Emperor, of treason to the Nine Houses, and of falsehood to her Cohort and her command." 

Lady Vakarian rose to her feet, slowly and painfully. Her eyes were red-rimmed but dry. Her hands were steady. As was her voice. "Forgive me, Lord, as you would not forgive your enemies."

The Emperor's eyebrows shot up. He allowed the silence to stretch. Then with terrible, terrible gentleness, he cupped Vakarian's cheek in his hand. With a chill, Mercy saw the violence of its power. Vakarian’s face did not change. "You would have me forgive them?" God asked, soft as the dawn. 

This seemed to do something to her that defied words. She made a low, keening sound, and the first tear rolled over her cheek as over a hill, coming to rest at the thumb of God. Wrecked, she said, "How can you blame them? They are children."

"They are the children of those who have slaughtered your forefathers," the Emperor reminded her. "They are the children of those who have slaughtered my family, and torched my home, and shed blood into the ground of the First House." His thumb moved over her face, his fingers sliding into her hair until he was cradling her skull. "They have put my children to the sword. You would have me forgive them?"

In a whisper, Vakarian said, "It is not their sin." And then, desperately: "We murder them for wrongs committed against fathers who died long before our time. How long will this go on? How long will we remember? How long will we teach the children of the Nine Houses the ruthless calculus of war, so that they may die also?"

As though whispered in her ear, Mercy heard,  _ Please. I have a sister. _ She felt the words rest on her chest, a great and terrible boulder. 

God said, "You dare ask this? We shall remember as long as I have memory to spare. And my memory is as long as warmth from Dominicus gives you the life that I returned to you."

Distantly, Mercy became aware of the soft hiss of the door and the fading sound of the intercom announcing Cassiopeia's arrival. Cassy came to stand over her shoulder, brushing Augustine's arm in silent greeting as she passed him. The three of them stood shoulder to shoulder, transfixed before the scene.

They watched as Vakarian took God by the hands and went to her knees before him again. She kissed each of his holy fingers, washing his hands with her tears, then tenderly released them and pressed her forehead to the cold floor of the ship. Her eyes were closed. With a twinge of discomfort, Mercy realized that she hadn't seen anyone prostrate themselves like this before the Lord since they abandoned Canaan house.

"When you razed Hazor, they forgave you," said Vakarian, and Mercy froze. "When you allowed your Lyctor to burn thousands of their children in a grave, they offered you peace. And yet you turn them away. Where is your mercy, Lord? Why have you grown so cold?"

The Emperor's face showed not a flicker of surprise. In a flat tone he said, "Get up. Take her to an enclosed hold, and make sure she lives." This was to the soldiers outside the doors. They complied quickly, not meeting his eyes, murmuring only a quick,  _ yes, Emperor _ . Vakarian went without complaint, her spine straight.

The door closed soundlessly.

God looked at his Lyctors. "What have you brought from Gilboa?"

No one moved at first. Mercy thought that she might be frozen to the floor, forever affixed to this awful ship like a statue. Finally, Augustine produced the box, fingers carefully not touching the dark rust of the blood ward. He set it on the desk. Then he briskly explained the dilemma. 

"The necromancer who set it is long dead. Based on genetic markers, it's almost certainly Vakarian's sister. Without her blood, it may be extremely difficult to open. She was quite good," he added, with no small amount of admiration.

The Emperor gave a tight nod. "Cassy?"

"Maybe," Cassy said. She wore a glazed-over expression, like she was already turning it over in her mind and cracking the box open like a walnut. "Yes. I think so."

"Good. Please do so as soon as possible. We'll do the trial here instead of taking her back home." 

The finality in his tone served as a dismissal. Cassy pocketed the box and took John's hand in hers, giving him a quick squeeze, then stepped away. Augustine opened his mouth, but turned to leave without comment. Mercy stood unmoving. Augustine shot her a quick look as they cleared out, and the door closed for the second time.

The silence seemed to leak into Mercy's lungs, choking her. She bore the Lord's gaze, and somehow did not crumble. She said, "You knew."

John sighed. "About your escapade in Hazor? Yes."

It was a silly thing to say and yet: "You didn't say anything."

"You went against orders and put yourself at risk for no good reason that I could see. You were tracked after you left Machaerus - somehow they knew who you were, or at least they knew you were a necromancer. I cannot imagine what mistake you could have made to reveal your hand so stupidly."

Mercy startled, and flushed. As though in a dream, she picked up that amber memory that felt like it belonged to another person. The name John Kovacs on the side of the rucksack. His mouth against her skin. He had said,  _ I need more _ . Mercy gritted her teeth and ruthlessly remembered the stunned look on his face, like he couldn't believe what he’d just felt. The bright, unmistakable rush of thelargic pleasure at the hands of a necromancer who could manipulate his body like a marionette. Mercy forced herself to see the shock and interest in his gaze on her wrist, thinly masked behind concern. 

She had handed herself to him like an idiot, and he did not let it go to waste.

John continued. "And yet. They led you to Hazor, and you did your duty."

Mercy scrambled to make sense of this, standing there gaping. She used to feel like this always when he spoke to her, each word from him a gift. He was God. She was lost at sea.

"You are pleased." It came out flat. She wanted, suddenly, to weep.

"Mercymorn," said her Lord. "Oh, Mercy." He stepped closer, reaching for her, and she found herself in an echo of the quasi-embrace he had shared with Vakarian. His hand was on her face, sliding into her hair. With his other hand he took her wrist and brought it to his heart. He wasn't smiling, but his eyes were a luminous, terrible black. He kissed her temple, then her cheek. For a wild moment, she thought he would devour her.

"You are my Hand and Gesture," he murmured into her ear. "You are the extension of my will and wrath. Of course I am pleased."

Mercy heard herself say, "She said they asked for peace."

"There will be no peace," vowed God. "And there will be no forgiveness."

~ 💀~

FIVE YEARS BEFORE THE MURDER OF CRISTABEL OCT

All of them loved the King Undying, but Cristabel loved the Resurrection more. She considered him a necessary, and even admirable, lever that pushed the world into swing. She would have died for him, but it was the world that she lived for. And they all knew it.

John, more than anyone, knew it.

"He's the Lord," Alfred was arguing in hushed tones, his golden head bent close to Cristabel's. Mercy paused in the shadows of the column, listening. She had been carrying a glass of cool water, and the condensation dripped from her fingers onto the floor.

Cristabel said, "I know."

It will always be difficult to look at this memory - like squinting into the sun. It will shine too bright and blurred, missing all the edges of conversation that Mercy failed to notice, all the detail that she deemed unimportant. It must have been - surely it was - the first memory she had of Cristabel and Alfred like this. The first time she'd heard the frustration in Cristabel's voice. The first time she paid attention to the space between them, so full that it might not have been space at all.

In Mercy's memory, Alfred put his hand to the back of his neck, tension in the line of his shoulders, and said, "Bel, come on. He's the Lord," like he was begging her for something. He said something else, quietly, the words getting lost in the undertone and Mercy's naked shock. She kept thinking that she didn't know. She didn't know he called her Bel.

"Yes," Cristabel said. "But I don't think we're the saints he wants."

~ 💀~

1 YEAR AFTER THE GREAT RESURRECTION

Cristabel's fingers were nimble in Mercy's hair, gentle and quick. When she tugged too hard on a strand, those fingers were there to brush along Mercy's hairline, her cheek - soothing. The silent apology that made Mercy wish, sometimes, that Cristabel would hurt her just so Mercy could feel the kiss of her skin asking for forgiveness. 

They used to spend hours in silence while Mercy pretended to read and Cristabel braided and re-braided her hair. She had always had restless hands, made all the more fidgety by long days spent on the road. They spent so many days on the road, back then, trailing in the Emperor's wake like supplicants. Disciples.

Cristabel's favorite style was an elaborate series of braids twisted up and twined with ribbon, curving around Mercy's head in loop after loop. The ribbon barely deserved its name, tattered as it was. But it was a way to judge her mood - she only did it when she was angry, or so full of sorrow that she could barely speak. Her hands always shook at first.

There were no mirrors in the destruction of the world and the birth of the First House, so it took weeks until Mercy caught a glimpse of her reflection in a passing window. Cristabel paused to look over her shoulder, watching the look that crossed Mercy's face. In the window, Mercy saw her own mouth open slightly. Even in the filthy, uneven surface, she could tell that her eyes had gone dark.

Cristabel had given her a halo to wear.

"Fear not," Cristabel said in her ear, more breath than sound. "I am the First and the Last."

It took a few tries for Mercy to speak. "I'm fairly certain that the Angel didn't look like this."

Cristabel was smiling lightly. "What did they look like?"

"Terrifying, I think. If they ward off fear as a greeting."

They looked at each other for a few minutes longer.

"You know," Cristabel said. When Mercy turned to face her, she was smiling even wider, and her eyes were the gray of summer storms. "If you had told me not to fear you when we first met, I would have fallen at your feet."

~ 💀~

The joke is, of course, that Cristabel had fallen anyway.

The Resurrection had swept through her like lightning, each cell of her body being made anew. Cristabel did not remember how she died. She knew only a great and terrible pain, not coming from anywhere in particular. She  _ was  _ a great and terrible pain, and she was the only thing in the universe.

Her first sight in the new age was glass in a heap on the ground. It had been crushed so finely that it looked like snow or diamond dust. Cristabel thought,  _ did I do that? Did I shatter after all? _

Her eyes followed it until it trailed underneath a pair of tired brown boots. The boots were worn by a young woman.

Mercymorn said nothing, but what could she say that her gaze did not already express? The man who was God, and the God who was man stood on a hill, the Resurrection spreading from him like a cancer. They stood before him, shivering.

It wasn't his fault, really, that Cristabel had seen only Mercymorn, with her pale sunset hair. If she had first set her eyes on the Emperor, would she have given her soul to him instead? Like a fairy tale curse. Maybe if she had - if she had loved him first and most, First and Last, then she would have gone to her knees for him instead. She would have stepped toward him and knelt on the soft earth of the hill, hands outstretched. If she hadn't been caught by his Saint instead.

Maybe then she wouldn't have landed on the shattered glass.

~ 💀~

Alfred's response to the story was a single line scrawled on the back of the letter, almost hasty in the jagged edges of his handwriting. But even then, Mercy knew better. Alfred was hasty about nothing. He had written:  _ You are saying you did not choose her. Was I much luckier, when I was born to him as a brother? We all chose this, C. _

Mercy returned it to its place on Cristabel's dresser, and took the first pin out of her hair. 

~ 💀~

2 YEARS AFTER THE DEATH OF CYRUS THE FIRST

Cassiopeia spent seven hours bent over the box. Then she asked for Eve Vakarian’s blood.

They brought it to her in the form of Eve Vakarian herself.

Cassy didn’t look surprised. She said, “You know, what’s interesting is that blood wards aren’t really blood wards. They’re more-” She hm’ed under her breath, squinting at the box as she thought. “Well, they’re more cell wards, really. In most cases, if you have the blood of a very close relative like a parent or a child, you could mimic the effect of the warder’s blood with a small thanergy burst. Or a sibling,” she added, though kindly.

Lady Vakarian flinched.

With the clinical briskness of a scientist, Cassy pulled out a bucket, took hold of Vakarian’s arm, and slashed a line down her wrist. 

Lady Vakarian keened, jerking back instinctively, but Cassy was unmoved. The blood gushed out thick, a river of crimson between her fingers. The metallic smell of it filled the room. It coated Mercy’s tongue, and she grimaced. She never really liked this kind of fleshy necromancy.

There was too much of it. By the time Cassy decided that it was enough, Vakarian looked pale, her eyes glassy. Cassy wrapped her fingers around the wound, and healed it just enough to slow the bleeding until it seeped. In a few economical moves, she produced a bandage and wrapped it around Vakarian’s wrist. She said something quietly that Mercy couldn’t hear, and then, louder, “I really am sorry about this, sweetheart. But God’s love has to be earned.” She said this the way Cassy said everything - kind and immovable.

Mercy was reminded, as she sometimes was, of the woman who created Teacher from the first death at Canaan House.

She watched as Cassy turned away and took the box, running her fingers over the ward again and again, like she was stroking a lover. The room filled with the scent of burning flesh. 

Mercy held back a wince.

It was, apparently, the thanergy burst that Cassy needed. As the flesh of her hand died again and again, she dipped the box into the blood until her knuckles rested at the bottom. She crouched over it on her knees; the blood reached her elbows. Then, with about as much fanfare as she stuck the thing in blood, she pulled it out. 

The box was bare.

Cassy offered it to Mercy, unfazed. “Would you open this, dear? I’m going to wash my hands.”

Mercy found herself holding it nervously. She waited until Cassy’s hands were clean and dry, came to rest on her shoulders, before she cracked the lid. Before taking it all the way off, she paused. 

“Do you know,” she said, awed. “I think I’m afraid.”

Cassy looked at her. “Of what’s inside the box?”

Mercy said, suddenly, “A.L. rests in a tomb locked by a blood ward.”

Cassy’s expression didn’t change. She said, “Yes, she does.” Like that was all.

And it was.

Then Mercy opened the box.

Inside they found a photograph of a group of people standing in front of a white fence. There were nineteen of them. Most of them were smiling, some were squinting in the sun. Nine wore rapiers strapped to their sides.

Mercy had forgotten, somehow, what they looked like. She had forgotten the exact tilt of Cristabel’s smile, the slope of Alfred’s nose. Even Cyrus, dead barely two years, had faded. 

She felt forced out of the moment, like she was watching herself look at a photograph of the people whom they loved and yet murdered anyway. Her finger moved to trace the face of the figure just barely in frame - her hair dark and long, her eyes that wretched, hot yellow even in the photograph.

She thought about the look on God’s face when he said,  _ no forgiveness _ . And, four thousand years earlier,  _ Yes. I will do as you ask _ .

From the doorway, Augustine cleared his throat. He said, “Sorry to interrupt but - Number Nine is at the Rim.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter-specific CW: violence, gore, psychological distress.
> 
> One more chapter to go!


	6. THE SHOVEL

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The finish line! My warmest thanks to those of you who have stuck it out with me this long - your comments and messages are the jewels which I hoard like a dragon. If you’re reading this in the future after Alecto the Ninth has been released and I have been proven completely wrong about everything - well, I hope you enjoyed it anyway.  
> I would like to recognize the musical band Bonefield (about which I know very little) and their song “The Shovel” (which I have heard so many times that my end-of-2020 Spotify stats will be embarrassing at best). Thematically the title of this fic is explained in this chapter, but it’s actually all about the song. It was the first song on my playlist, and its mood grabbed me so strongly that I got through a solid one third of the first draft just by listening to it for inspiration. I’m fairly sure this fic wouldn’t have been written if I wasn’t so obsessed with it, but hey - we get our inspiration where we can!  
> As always, please check the end notes for content warnings relevant to this chapter.

_ Save me, O Lord, for there is now no saint: truths are decayed from among the children of men. _

(Psalm 11:2-3)

105 YEARS AFTER THE EXECUTION OF EVE VAKARIAN

When Cassy died, the whole thing felt like a farce. Another piece of theatre they were all conducting together. An improvisation in tragedy. 

There were only five of them left.

Almost five thousand years. That's the half-life of Lyctors, it seemed. 

Maybe it was the fact that, for the first time in their string of funerals, they had watched this body torn apart. No clean trip into the bowels of a black star for Cassy; no gentle glide into a stoma like a whale's mouth. She had been the bravest and strongest and cleverest of them. They all knew it. And they all watched her die.

"How morbid," Cytherea said after a long while. Augustine seemed to wake from a stupor at her voice, shaking once.

They suffered through another silence as empty as the coffin before them.

"I regret," the King Undying, the Prince of Saints, began to say; "that she suffered. So much."

And for the first time in her life, Mercy thought,  _ Do you? _

So. Even Saints doubt God's love.

~ 💀~

1 DAY AFTER THE MURDER OF CRISTABEL OCT

They didn't realize it then, not truly, but they were incandescent with rage.

Only with a myriad's distance could they recognize it. The anger of the young that they simply can't scrape up any longer - a righteous, blinding fury. 

They made themselves murderers for the Lord and he said that it was good, but it wasn't. It was a living nightmare.

Ten thousand years. Six funerals. 

This bit is difficult to remember, but God, how they must have hated one another. How they must have hated that house. To walk around and touch the things that their cavaliers had touched, to look at the world through their cavaliers' eyes. God held their hands and said, gently, "They laid under the butcher's knife of their own free will. They  _ chose  _ this."

It was the cruelest thing he had ever said.

Mercymorn sat on the railing, feet dangling over the endless drop to the rocks below. The wind slapped her hair across her face, but she made no move to tie it back. It had grown out so long that she felt her hate turn to it, but it was the last part of herself that Cristabel had touched in kindness. The last time it had been cut, Cristabel was guiding the chunky scissors through a series of snips, brushing it off Mercy's shoulders, and laughing in her ear. 

It was easiest of all to hate Cristabel, because her absence made it so impossible to love her. Love needed a container to fill - a pair of hands cupped together to receive it. But this rage simply needed to breathe. It thrived on the emptiness, sucking at it greedily. 

Mercy had done such a good job of feeding it.

She didn't know how long she'd sat there. It could have been days. By the time she scraped herself off the railing and drifted to the kitchen, the sun had gone down and the house was silent as the grave.

In the kitchen - Alfred.

It was such a quick, painful thought that it tore through her chest as though through tissue. They were the same height, with that same blond hair. 

The same eyes.

Mercy gasped out, "God."

Slowly, Augustine turned to face her, the line of his back straight and rigid. He said, "Nope. Just me, Mercymorn the First."

His skin splitting beneath her fist felt so good that Mercy almost wept d with relief. It was a fast, solid punch. Blood bloomed on his mouth. He was so alive, and Alfred and Cristabel were so, so dead.

Before the thought could register, Mercy's spine slammed against the table. Vertebrae popped as she was bent back at an obscene angle. The pain felt like a song. Augustine's breath was too loud, panting between them with unexpected strain. This was the closest they'd been in weeks, just looking at each other.

Augustine spoke first. "Her eyes don't suit you. You look even more addle-brained than you are."

With a howl, Mercy launched herself at him, but this time he was ready. One hand shot out, fingers in claws of bone and fat, and raked against her side, pinning her to the table. With his other hand he gripped her long, hated hair in a fist and slammed her head against the table. 

Through the ringing in her ears, Mercy reached up, dug her nails and the pads of her fingers into the soft, life-hot pulse at his wrist, and lit up his nerves with as much pain as she could manage. It was messy, confused by the blank emptiness of his new Lyctor body, but it was enough. Augustine howled, stumbling away. Faintly, Mercy realized she hadn't heard him scream since that first year. 

Well, it was about fucking time.

"I wish you had to see it in the mirror," she hissed at him. Her mouth felt like it was on fire, and then suddenly it didn't. She spit out blood, baring her teeth. "I wish you had to see his eyes staring at you out of your own face. I guess that's one of the perks of playing Cain."

Augustine sneered, ugly and vicious. He looked deranged, and sick with grief, and alight with fury. 

He looked the way he did when Mercy first met him, on the dawn of the Resurrection.

"It didn't have to be this way," he said, monstrous in front of her. "If Cristabel had just kept her mouth shut for once-"

Mercy launched herself at him, howling. She was aiming for his face, fingers splayed, but he knocked her hands down. They came to rest on his chest. Barely thinking about it, still flushed with power, Mercy extended the cartilage of her fingernails and sliced the meat near his ribs until she felt bone, slippery with blood, the light pink of Augustine’s lungs peeking through coyly. Then she plunged in her hand and wrapped it around a rib.

With a sickening crack, she tore it out.

"Don't you even say her name!" she screeched. She would kill him. They were both unkillable but she would put him in the ground where they belonged.

Like a spiteful child, choking on blood and writhing, Augustine said, "Cristabel."

All the fight gone out of her, Mercy sat back and watched as Augustine’s flesh slowly knit itself together. His chest heaved, drawing a whimper with each breath, agony in every line of his body.

Distantly, Mercy realized that they were both crying.

She whispered, "Grant me mercy."

But it wasn’t Augustine she was begging.

~ 💀~

1 YEAR AFTER THE DEATH OF CASSIOPEIA THE FIRST

They called it the chapel when they first came to the Mithraeum, and it felt like that - enclosed and comfortable, forever lit by candles. They had buried a Lyctor here, and mourned three more. They had prayed here, with God in the next room. 

Mercy sank down on one of the benches, her back to the door. The dais was empty - Cassy’s body was gone.

She didn't know how long she sat there before the door creaked and she heard footsteps coming closer. She'd had thousands of lifetimes to learn the tread of Augustine’s feet on this floor.

She didn't turn around. Neither of them said anything. She felt the air stir at her back as he lowered himself to the bench, then hoisted one leg over it until they were both facing the same direction, Mercy on the edge of the bench and Augustine behind her. His fingers at her shoulders were light, as though afraid to spook an animal. She allowed him to gather her hair and twist it in his hands, tortuously slow, then put it over her right shoulder. 

She sat still as he moved until his stomach rested against her back; she realized, distantly, that he had brushed aside her hair so that he could put his chin on her shoulder. Her fingers curled around his tightly when he brought one arm around to her stomach. Their other hands laid entwined on the meat of her thigh, a point of contact by which she could ground herself. 

They breathed as an echo of the people they were, for a few moments, on Gilboa. Their hands braced against the desk in that library, the sweet relief of pretending, just a little, that they remained as they were before the Resurrection. The necromancy useless because they willed it so.

They had not been this close in almost one hundred years.

A Lyctor's body is an opaque glass, but the longer you squint the more you see. They sat there, cheek to cheek, for so long that the slow thump of Augustine's heart against her back grew from an instinctual, animal feeling to a blueprint slowly filling in. The width of his aorta, the measure between his ribs, the swell of his kidneys - all of it completely laid bare, Mercy realized with some alarm, for the first time.

She knew, by Augustine's unsteady breathing, that he had the same access to the linchpins holding her together. It would be so easy to rip each other apart. She wouldn't even have to crush his ribcage; she knew, without a shadow of a doubt, where to plunge her fingernails to shred his lungs this time.

It would have been so much easier if they had loved each other all this time. 

They could have banished their loneliness if only they could stop seeing the echo of Cristabel and Alfred in each other’s faces. If they had seen each other instead.

But they would have to forgive themselves, first. And in that, John was right. There will be no forgiveness.

They sat there all night, hand in hand, anyway.

~ 💀~

Mercy walked past the chapel in the morning, and saw Cytherea’s shawl-clad form draped over the pews like a Gothic heroine waiting hopefully for consumption to claim her lungs. The mass of white frills shook with a cough, as though in response to Mercy’s thoughts, and waved a pale hand.

“I am just thinking how much she’s suffered,” Cytherea confessed, the creep. “It was a long death.”

“Yes, quite the tableau.” 

Cytherea peeked over her shoulder, eyebrow at the ready to be arched in pity. “You know what I mean, Mercy. She would have hated it.”

“What, dying?”

Cytherea ignored the bite in Mercy’s voice. “The suffering. Keep up.” When Mercy failed to agree, Cytherea sighed. “After Cyrus misplaced his body in the black hole, Cassy told me that the more people suffer, the longer they live. Like pain is a fuel.”

“It sounds like her usual load of bullshit,” Mercy snapped, unfairly.

“You know what I thought?” Cytherea asked, apparently of the air. “I thought, maybe that’s why we’re all going to live forever. We sure as hell earned it.”

Mercy closed her eyes, and turned away.

~ 💀~

290 YEARS AFTER THE DEATH OF CASSIOPEIA THE FIRST

Mercy needed to find Augustine and she needed one of his awful, noxious cigarettes that tasted like tar. Her mouth needed to touch something that someone alive has touched, and she wouldn't balk even if that person were Augustine. 

When she reached the part of the ship that Cytherea whimsically called the Greenhouse and Mercy mentally dubbed the jail-yard, she found Augustine exactly where she suspected he'd be. Perched on something that might have resembled a bench, the evil-smelling nicotine spread out over a kerchief on his thigh. 

Mercy's stomach clenched.

If they had ever been friends - if they had ever been kind enough to one another to share the people they loved, Mercy would have said, T _ hey have been dead for five thousands years and still sometimes I think I see them in a crowd. The way a soldier throws his head back to laugh on a ship. The pale yellow of a shop-keeper's hair. Not even you have ever fucked me as well as I fuck myself in the moments that I let myself believe I see them out of the corner of my eye. _

"Are you going to come in, or are you just going to stand there moping?" Augustine's voice shattered her thoughts like a mallet striking glass. Mercy made a face, and closed the door.

She stood there, staring at Augustine until he looked up to roll his eyes at her. Then she said, "Where does God's might come from?"

There have been countless silences between them over the years, but none like this. Mercy looked at him and imagined a bubble appearing over his head like a speech balloon, filled with everything he's ever said. Unlovable Mercy. Ungrateful Mercy. Unfaithful Mercy. Her palms were sweating.

Augustine's voice was flat. "He is God."

"Yes." She allowed the following silence, then asked: "What is God afraid of?"

Slowly, he gave her a frigid smile. "Are you playing Judas, Mercymorn?"

"Augustine, for once in your fucking life - answer the question." Mercy knew her voice was shaking. Her weakness like an exposed belly, presented for Augustine's sharp claws. He will tear her to bits with her own grief. He will feast on unfaithfulness.

But. This thing they have always had in common - they were there at the beginning, and they loved John with their eyes wide open. 

"Why now?"

It wasn't what Mercy expected him to ask. She shrugged. "Cassy's been dead for decades. It's just the first and the last, now. Cytherea doesn't have the guts. She wouldn't wonder."

"Wonder what, Joy?" And there it was, the sharpness. Augustine rolled up the cigarette then lit it, never taking his eyes off her. "Wonder if God lied? I’ve played Cain already, sweet girl, and it’s not all it’s cracked up to be."

"Tell me I'm wrong. Tell me I'm crazy. It won't be a hardship for you. But answer the question - where does his power come from?"

It was the little tells: Augustine's sharp inhale of smoke, the tension in his jaw. They have known each other longer than the world has been breathing. 

Augustine said, “No.”

“Augustine -”

“No, Mercymorn,” he interrupted, unyielding. “And I will do you the great favor of pretending we never had this conversation.” And then, when he saw that she was about to go on: “If you loved him, you would not doubt.”

~ 💀~

About this, like many things, Augustine was wrong. You see, when you love someone for thousands of years, for thousands of lifetimes, for thousands of deaths - you can do monstrous things and continue to love them. 

It turns out that the prerequisite for Lyctorhood is a very short list: you have to be deeply selfish, and irrevocably loved. 

And God is, as you now know, the first Lyctor.

~ 💀~

2790 YEARS AFTER THE DEATH OF CASSIOPEIA THE FIRST

The message had been on paper, Augustine’s handwriting slashing at it as though in anger. It was just a date and place, followed by: _ I think you’re right. _

Three thousand years to change his mind. Well, color her shocked.

They met on what used to be Gilboa, at the place where once stood a house. Now it was a wreck of rock and forest, the barest outline of the foundation visible. It felt haunted, like it should have been a revenant.

In some ways, it was.

Mercy arrived first, wrinkling her nose at the disrepair. It was the dry season, at least. She did so hate the cold.

She crouched at the threshold and let herself think it: she missed Canaan House. 

No, the truth was - she wanted to touch something that Cristabel had touched.

She lifted her hand to the dust on the ground. She traced the letters into the dirt, feeling grit lodge under her fingernails.

M & C

One flesh. One end.

Mercy was so tired of the flesh. She didn't want it anymore. She wanted Cristabel's - she would have given anything to exchange this body for her cavalier's. Just the press of a finger to her pulse. Just the breath from parted lips. Just a soft touch in her hair. Anything anything anything.

But all she had were Cristabel's eyes, looking at her from every mirror.

She dragged her finger in a line underneath the word  _ end _ . "When, darling?" she asked. 

"Talking to yourself, Joy?"

By some miracle, Mercy didn’t flinch.

"One has to take clever conversation where one can find it.” Slowly, she slid her palm through the dust and wiped out the scribbles. There was no way of telling if he'd seen it, but she didn't care. He was here. That was enough.

"Har har har. I don't have all day," Augustine said. He didn’t look at her. "Let's get to it. So, he's lying? Our dear A.L. isn't dead?"

It was the first time either of them had said it out loud.

Mercy said, "Maybe." And then she laid it all out: his power, seemingly sourceless. Cassy's frown after she'd had thousands of years to research what they had done, the way she'd flinched at what she told Mercy about souls. 

Augustine didn't speak for a long time, just stared out over the ruin of what might have been the kitchen, once, or the library. He looked like he was miles away. Light years away.

Finally, he turned his head and met Mercy's gaze, his mouth a hard line. "If you're right," he began, haltingly. Mercy tried to place the look on his face, the pale and tight grief like a shirt that was too small. With a jolt, she realized that she had seen it before. It was how he looked after he became a Lyctor. "Mercymorn, if you are right - and I'm not saying you are - then he lied about…everything."

Cytherea's voice, empty.  _ We had the choice to stop. _ Mercy felt ill. 

But Augustine wasn't looking at her any longer. They have known each other for seven thousand years, and still they often...missed pieces of one another. Like looking out the window at a familiar scene, with rain running down the sides of the glass and blurring the edges. You know what's there, in those spaces that are hidden only for a moment. You know the scene in its entirety. But sometimes you can't quite see it.

Into the silence, he said, "Don't take this the wrong way, Joy, but you never loved him. Not the way you should have."

She moved so fast it felt like her body made the decision before her temper caught up, but Augustine was faster. He snatched her wrist, her nails a centimeter from the smooth skin of his cheek. She trembled with the fury that made her want to sink in her claws and make him suffer, but for once Augustine wasn't on the same page. He gripped her wrist long enough to make it clear he wasn't letting go, then turned her hand over in his. 

"There is no going back," he said. “If we don’t forgive him now, there is no going back.”

Mercy met the cool gray of Alfred's eyes, and all the fury seeped out of her. 

"There was never going back for any of us," she told him. 

Augustine gave her a rueful smile. And as he slowly pressed his mouth to her wrist, sealing their bargain, Mercy thought, unsteadily, of Judas' kiss.

~ 💀~

After they made their plans, Augustine and Mercy sat on the rotting threshold of the house where Augustine had asked, once,  _ do you ever blame John for what happened? _ , and passed a cigarette between them.

Gilboa was in the midst of summer. The air was balmy, leaving them sticky but not warm, carrying with it the sweet scent of night-blooming bushes that lined the path outside. The tiny, blue flowers were quite ugly, really. Mercy always felt calmed by them.

Long after the cigarette had been smoked to a stub, Augustine sighed and slanted a look at her. She lifted an eyebrow in his general direction. Uncomfortably, she couldn't remember the last time they'd spent so much time together without even threatening to rip each other's throats out. Cassy’s funeral was a very long time ago.

"Just one question," said the Saint of Patience. "When you started digging your way through those anatomy books when we came here, after we buried Cyrus - was it for this?"

To his credit, he did an admirable job of making this question sound like a casual inquiry instead of an accusation that Mercy had been plotting the Lord's downfall for about three thousand years. 

Mercy steepled her fingers together and closed her eyes. With every fiber of her body, she began to project the aura of,  _ I'm thinking _ . Augustine allowed this. 

They sat in silence some more.

At last, Mercy un-steepled her fingers and said, "When we begged and groused and threatened our Lord to please, pretty please, wipe A.L.'s soul from this sad existence, he said he didn't want to do it because he wasn't a murderer. Then he said he wouldn't do it because she was our family. But never once did he say it was because he loved her."

Augustine pressed his lips together for a moment, as though holding something back. "You think he didn't?"

"Of course he did. He loved A.L., and he loved our cavaliers. And he even loved us," she added. "Still loves us. I don't really...doubt it."

"Well then. Your point?"

"My point is that he didn't say that he loved A.L. because he knew even then that it didn't matter. Because we all loved our cavaliers, you see, and we still murdered them.

"This whole time," she went on. "Cytherea always said that if we had anything, then we had each other. We had committed the same sin. We had abandoned the same house. But when we asked John to kill the monster, we named the wrong monster."

Augustine's silence was one of perfect understanding.

"If you could go back," he asked, measured; "would you still put the knife to Cristabel's throat?"

Mercy closed her eyes. "Would you kill Alfred if you knew you didn't have to?" It wasn't the same question, but Augustine didn't point this out - just waited. "This is who we  _ are _ , Augustine. We have been murderers for a myriad. We have been his disciples for even longer. There may be a point when we are no longer disciples because we would have taught the King Undying to die. We have made monsters of ourselves, and there's no going back from that. I love him. But I’ve killed those I loved, before."

After a pause, Augustine laughed. Mercy scraped up the strength to finally look at him, and found him with his head in his hands, shoulders shaking. She hoped he wasn't crying - she was kind of monopolizing the emotional breakdown space right now. 

"He calls us his Hands," Augustine said, muffled. He shuddered once more, then looked up. His eyes were red, but there was no sign of tears. "And here we sit, digging his grave."

Mercymorn the First met his gaze. “Then I think, Augustine, it’s about time we got ourselves a shovel.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter-specific CW: violence, gore.  
> [say hi](http://lyhoradka.tumblr.com) on tumblr!


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